Has human rights work become institutionalised?
Written by SAHR member, Nishma Jethwa and Helena Zeweri.
The concept of human rights is thought to have been developed post-WW2/holocaust/decolonisation and with the founding of UN in 1950s and 60s. But the problems that triggered the mainstreaming of human rights were themselves first and foremost political and military issues. It was only when refugees became a military problem that they also became a human rights problem. There is a strong link between militarisation and human rights. On the one hand, the Global North create many of the human rights problems of our day and then, on the other, attempt to solve them without taking into account their complicit-ness in their very formation.
A large part of the problem is in the way we narrate/tell the stories of how human rights issues came about. How we tell someone’s story is so key to how we situate our own intervention into it. If you tie the cause of someone’s situation of suffering to a fixed culture or an inherently bad community, it becomes so “easy” to fix that and to turn both the problem and the intervention into a moral question. It becomes solely about relieving someone’s ongoing suffering which is tied to something they have been born into. This happens with categories of particular groups of vulnerable people, which are always historically situated categories. For example, “Afghan women” wasn’t a category until the US intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001. There is now a common understanding around this term now which would never have previously existed or would have taken a different form if the events of 9/11 had not happened.
The key to the process of vernacularisation, Merry says in her article, are people in the middle: those who translate discourses and practices from international law to local situations of suffering and violation — translators or intermediaries (Merry 2006: 39). Their work is influenced by funders, the ethnic and social communities they work for and institutional frameworks that create opportunities for wealth and power. If so, is the world of Development Work its own industry? An industry that people go into because of the titles, the moral virtue and even the wealth that it affords them, that it now holds a distinct identity to say that “I work in human rights, or in activism, or with such and such development NGO”? How do moral virtue and this identity get collapsed together? Why does the work of humanitarianism, human rights work, development work, etc. all get pushed under the same umbrella of activity by the public and by people involved in these arenas?
To what extent do people who get involved in Development Work do it as it is the “thing to do”, as part of the coming-of-age of a new generation of transnational elite. To what extent is development work now an industry like any other? A comparison can be made with the university system in the US and how it too has now become a corporation (as opposed to a space dedicated to public service for democratic and open intellectual exchange). Another example: competition in funding. What organisations present to be their work to funders becomes conflated with the actual work they do. It is driven by the competitive spirit, removing the productiveness of networks and collaborations. Is it then a question of bringing funder expectations into line with the larger objectives of Development Work and, if so, how do we go about doing this?
Analiese Riles’ work with international human rights organisations is particularly interesting — in how we have come to see NGOs as partners and productive networks that do serious and successful work (Riles 2006). We look at their reports and statistical analyses, recommendation manuals, conferences etc… and we see that they’re all linked and working together in some productive way. The network is a particular type of form that gives off the impression that the work being done is very effective. The act of having conferences, workshops and producing documents makes it seem as though development work is having real efficacy in the world. We judge it that way and seemingly fail to question it. What we are really doing is producing reports and facilitating conferences. What makes us think that we are having a material impact on something in the world? Perhaps it is the idea of being involved in something like going through documents, typing up documents, networking, going to conferences that creates the huge gravitational pull towards Development Work for so many people.
Organisations like Acumen (acumen.org), Ashoka Fellows (https://www.ashoka.org/fellows) and many others which bring people who want to work in Development Work together from around the world, link them up, teach them and send them out as “experienced” Development Work practitioners. How does this linking up reinforce the idea that the Development Work practitioner is, in fact, just another professionalised worker like any other (lawyer, doctor, consultant etc.)? In particular, there are homogenous requirements and practices that are now now seen as necessary to be able to work in development. Development Work itself is becoming (more) institutionalised to the extent that it, perhaps, can no longer be used as a platform to critique the institutions themselves. Perhaps showing how these processes happen can denaturalise them, and thus show that the development practice as it is today was not always as such; that disaggregating concepts in this way could be a powerful tool.
