REVIEW of WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalizing Age
Jean Quataert. Review of Reilly,
Niamh, Women's Human Rights.
H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews. August, 2010
Feminism and Women’s Human Rights: An Urgent Agenda for
Advocacy
Scholars and activists involved in human rights debates cannot help but note the
dramatic rise in relevant publications in journal and book form, whether by
trained academics or hands-on activists or a salutary mix of the two. Political
scientists and international law scholars now share the field with colleagues
across the full range of the human and social sciences who bring new
perspectives and understandings to the debates. What is less commonly noted is
the increasingly complex, nuanced, and troubled arguments that mark this “rise”
in interest in human rights themes. Overtaken are the simpler notions of
automatic linear progress and human betterment that perhaps fit with the
widespread optimism about human rights potentials breaking out in many parts of
the globe in the early 1990s. The change reflects not only the critical maturing
of the field of inquiry but also a much more troubled climate for human rights
activism in the early twenty-first century. The pervasive spread of human rights
language since 1945 has also meant its growing co-optation by powerful elites,
and declared linkages to neoliberal market forces, humanitarian military
intervention, occupation, and war. No wonder that human rights meanings are
fluid, highly controversial, and morally contested.
In her new book, Niamh Reilly confronts this climate directly. Hers is an
eminently political project designed to examine the deteriorating climate for
women’s human rights since its heyday at the International Conference on
Population and Development in Cairo in l994 and the Fourth Women’s World
Conference in Beijing in l995. These international gatherings proclaimed women’s
rights as human rights; condemned all forms of violence against women, including
those rooted in religion and custom; and upheld sexual self-determination,
particularly in the form of reproductive rights. Since then, at the
international and national levels, a range of fundamentalist and conservative
forces crisscrossing the globe (led at times by the United States under the
George W. Bush administration) have mounted a partially successful
countermovement to restrict these principles and prevent advances, particularly
in matters of sexual orientation. Mobilizing transnationally, these forces have
used domestic and international law-making processes for their purposes. This
strategy turns the law into an increasingly critical site for continuing
feminist struggle, in Reilly’s view. The book, then, is part of a wider body of
literature seeking to make human rights a central focus of contemporary
international feminist advocacy. But Reilly also is keenly aware of the
skeptical climate for her project--a skepticism that characterizes a wide range
of potential readers of this study. Thus, the arguments are carefully
constructed to address feminist activists and scholars in different regions of
the world concerned with the ease with which human rights language becomes part
of imperialist and authoritarian ventures, including ostensibly “humanitarian”
projects. As Western great power politics (and the political Right)
instrumentalize women’s rights for interventionist purposes, the radical
potential of women’s rights claims must be reasserted. In addition, Reilly
speaks to mainstream human rights groups still ambivalent about the validity of
women’s rights challenges and, innovatively, seeks to bridge the continuing gaps
between development activists and the rights community. Relatively short but
densely written, Reilly’s study offers many innovative ideas for constructive
dialogues among global groups that share the goals of gender equality and
economic justice but diverge over strategies and priorities.
Reilly brings what she calls “cosmopolitan feminism” to human rights debates.
This entails a deliberate distancing from “mainstream” human rights thinking. As
a transnational activist in the l990s, she was part of the historical shift from
women’s rights to human rights during the U.N. Decade for Women, 1975-85, and
experienced firsthand the many ways the coalescence of the global women’s
movement challenged the human rights orthodoxy. The first two chapters of the
book offer the theoretical underpinnings and activist strategies that are needed
to sustain the ties between feminism and human rights. She lays out her
propositions for global activism carefully, recognizing the multiple
perspectives that now inform a critical feminist theory. She proposes a
grassroots, bottom-up approach to transnational feminist activism that takes
into account the fluid reality of intersectional vulnerability on the ground.
This feminist grounding challenges the mainstream liberal divides between public
and private domains, which still inform much of human rights advocacy, and it
requires a continuous affirmation of the indivisibility of human rights, which
means in practice elevating economic and social rights to a central place in all
human rights advocacy. It also entails negotiating a viable position between the
poles of Western hegemony and cultural relativism, and rejects both a rigid
“legalism” that views law as a set of rules and regulations separate from
societal contexts and a state-centric human rights stance. This agenda, indeed,
reinvigorates human rights thinking and practice. The remaining five thematic
and chronological chapters, focusing on the achievements and shortcomings of
women’s human rights advocacy, move between a historical account of how this
theory worked to effect change over the last sixty years and a prescriptive call
to action.
All the chapters are detailed, informative, and conceptually useful. Some are
particularly innovative, like chapter 6, which addresses the world of mutual
suspicions between women’s rights advocates and development experts, including
feminist proponents of “gender and development” (GAD). In every case, Reilly
seeks to illustrate her major propositions. For example, chapter 3, which
examines the first four decades of feminist activism in the United Nations for
equality and nondiscrimination in the law, documents the significant role of
women from the South in shaping debates, institutions, and laws. Human rights
advocacy never was simply a matter of Western impositions. Chapter 4 examines
historically the pattern of transnational feminist advocacy that sustained the
emerging global women’s human rights movements in the l980s and l990s: the
campaigns to oppose violence against women and those for reproductive and sexual
rights. She provides rich evidence to show how concerns on the ground with
women’s bodily integrity and the gender-specific patterns of violence sustained
new global networks. She also weaves in the necessity to address poverty and
global economic inequalities in these mobilizations and acknowledges linkages
between reproductive health issues and gender sensitive development policies. In
explaining receptivity, Reilly posits that the successful global campaign to
challenge gender violence fits into both dominant civil rights norms and
traditional individualist perspectives in rights thinking. Sexual and
reproductive rights, however, require “an even bigger leap” in assumptions. This
claim “introduces ideas of self-determination” into traditional arenas of
patriarchal power and requires “proactive understanding of the right to health,”
an evolving socioeconomic right enjoying less international consensus than a
civil right (p. 91). Chapter 7 on fundamentalisms (deliberately plural) in
local, national, and international contests draws on examples of
anti-fundamentalist feminist praxis that counters the backlash and
simultaneously deepens understandings of rights, democracy, and the rule of law.
Chapter 5 addresses how women’s human rights are used to promote gender justice
in post-conflict transitional contexts. A radical feminist perspective regards
these transitions as fluid and open moments, opportunities to bring about
significant social and economic change. Reilly follows two related campaigns in
some detail, the first to include gender protections in the statutes of the
International Criminal Court and the second to bring women’s voices and
perspectives into all phases of peace-building operations, proclaimed in
Security Council Resolution 1325 in the year 2000.
Throughout this study, Reilly carefully unpacks the many contradictions and
tensions that accompany the global women’s human rights project. As she puts it,
her book demonstrates the “modest gains and persistent obstacles” in this
undertaking (p. 115). While carefully constructed in the main, there are several
analytical shortcomings. First, she proposes that cosmopolitan feminism is
enriched and sustained by its grassroots mobilizations and receptivity to
bottom-up influences. Yet this assertion is not sufficiently developed, neither
theoretically nor empirically. Reilly is writing about the many contestations
around the global discourses on women’s human rights and shows how mobilizations
coordinated, for example, by the Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights pushed
the debates at the international level. Her focus is on the global discourses,
however, and the bottom-up approach is posited. Left unexamined is the texture
of meaning at the local level, why and how certain individuals and groups become
activists and push for change, and the many triggers for the rise and fall of
new networks. Integrating these precise histories into a study of global
discourses remains an important agenda for future research. Second, she claims
to offer a critique of “state-centered” rights discourses. But here she only
restates the feminist challenge to the public/private divide and asserts the
principle of “due diligence,” that the state must be held accountable also for
systemic abuses by private persons in the realm of family and customary law. It
appears to me that she fails to address the many questions raised by
contemporary feminist scholars and activists confronting nondemocratic and
authoritarian state structures. How do cosmopolitan feminists committed to
rights agendas understand the role of the state itself in promoting and
implementing rights? This is a major issue still to be debated in inter-regional
contexts. Importantly, Reilly’s study promotes such critical dialogues,
especially for feminists, who are skeptical of human rights agendas, and for
human rights activists, who need to confront continuously the limitations of
their own thinking and activism. This book is essential reading on the ongoing
development of a critical human rights practice.
Reviewed by Jean Quataert
(Department of History, SUNY-Binghamton)
>> To see the review, click
here.
|