Constellations of Human Rights

Abstract

This article explores the production of human rights discourse by examining the organization and social actors involved in its construction. The author proposes a triad constellation configuration for situating the varied engagements of human rights by different constituencies at the United Nations level: dominant understandings, counterpublic approaches, and social praxis. Dominant understandings are affiliated with the Western-legal apparatus, counterpublic approaches embrace antiracist and feminist epistemologies, and social praxis is about the mediation between the first two constellations. This article argues that the social praxis constellation is where the discourse of human rights can be inventive and dynamic because an envisioning of human rights moves beyond the rubric of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights.

Keywords

advocacy discourse human rights ontology sociology United Nations

Introduction

It is precisely in the field of human rights that Western culture must learn from the South if the false universality that is attributed to human rights in the imperial context is to be converted into the new universality of cosmopolitanism in a cross-cultural dialogue. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2002: 54)

When indigenous activists in Mexico invoke the discourse of ‘human rights’, is it aligned or not with the state? Consider indigenous activists who engage in advocacy efforts at the United Nations (UN) level: how is their approach dissimilar or overlapping with the UN’s appeal to human rights standards, specifically within the context of key documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? For Alberta Beatríz ‘Bety’ Cariño Trujillo, an indigenous woman activist from Mexico assassinated by a state paramilitary group for her human rights activism in Oaxaca in 2010, the ‘daily business of human rights’ is one that cannot be sidelined.¹ So how does Cariño’s commitment to the ‘daily business of human rights’ – deeply rooted in the struggles of her people against a powerful and violent state – become as meaningful to the production of human rights discourse as the legal frameworks that shape international treaties? More importantly, in taking up the point raised by de Sousa Santos, what can be learned ‘from the South’ about the limits placed on the discursive production and practice of human rights by the global North?²

When discourse is associated with an institution, as is the case with human rights and its link to the UN, it becomes extremely powerful. By moving beyond a narrow political discourse about human rights based on a tradition of liberal humanism, modes of discursive production become as pivotal as modes of discursive practice. This article recognizes that the production of human rights discourse and its related practice is no longer limited to powerful government delegates or UN diplomats. Further, the multiple constituencies who engage with human rights today do so by referencing a different set of epistemologies and ontologies upon which they produce and practice human rights.

By conceptualizing human rights within a constellations model, then, the various facets to its discursive production can be disentangled. The purpose of this exercise is to decipher the spaces in which human rights has been innovative and perhaps in some cases, linked. In each constellation, diverse but related strands of thought intermingle and no one strand is superior to another. I argue that three constellations of human rights operate at the UN level: dominant understandings, which are related to the Western-influenced legal apparatus of laws and courts; counterpublic approaches, which embrace alternative epistemologies based on feminist and antiracist politics; and social praxis, which reflects how social actors mediate between the first two constellations through their practice of human rights (see Zwingel, 2010, 2012).³

The dominant understandings that are contained in the first constellation rely on a universal human nature that is reflected in ‘the specific experiences, needs, and values of affluent white Western men’ (Brems, 2003; Collins et al., 2010). This constellation represents the prevailing discourse about human rights at the UN. The counterpublic approach of the second constellation embraces alternative epistemologies of human rights based on a politics of feminism and antiracism that stems from an ontology that is relational, in contrast to the absolutist positions associated with the dominant constellation. An approach that is counterpublic – which refers to ‘an oppositional space in which networks, organizations, and individuals who share certain values or identities engage with one another around a core theme’ (Thayer, 2009: 26) – reflects the views and actions of constituencies who had been excluded from the conversations and debates about human rights in the late 1940s. The struggle between these two constellations is waged in political forums and institutions, including the UN, within the space of the social praxis constellation. An examination of these three constellations reveals the changing nature of political and social engagements with the discursive production and organization of human rights, and underscores the meaning of what human rights could, or should, become relies on socio-political interests (see Fernandes, 2013).⁴ More importantly, I argue that the social praxis constellation is where the positioning of human rights has been particularly creative, productive, and dynamic.

Other constellations of human rights may very well be operating within and outside of the UN beyond this triad; however, based on my research with antiracist and feminist activists throughout the Américas region, these three engagements are the most evident. Of particular interest to this research is the third constellation (social praxis) because of its grounded approach to the discursive production and practice of human rights. The ways in which human rights becomes negotiated and strategically used in advocacy efforts in this space uncovers a critical bridging between legal and non-Western dominated approaches to human rights advocacy.

Unpacking the Triad Constellation: Engagements and Discursive Production

The UN is a unique space in that it brings together a range of voices, from the radical to the conservative, from long-time diplomats to grassroots activists. Their understandings about human rights form the basis of their advocacy efforts and converge in this shared space. The approaches to human rights practiced by the many activists I have interviewed over the years represent a departure from the strict legal understandings of human rights that can prevail at the UN. The transformation to what Walter Mignolo (2009: 21) calls a ‘polycentric discourse on human and rights’ – or, more pointedly, to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002: 47) terms a ‘mestiza conception of human rights’ – demands consideration of alternative feminist and antiracist epistemologies of human rights (Brems, 2003; Speed and Collier, 2000; Wilson, 1997; see also de Sousa Santos, 2002). The three constellations of human rights described below offer a framework for analyzing how human rights are constructed and practiced in relationship to the UN and how, in turn, the UN’s human rights agenda must also contend and negotiate the application of non-dominant production and practices of human rights.

Dominant Understandings

Dominant understandings of human rights correspond to laws and legal approaches. This schema is deemed dominant because of the institutions (i.e. court systems, the UN) that regulate and structure societies. Laws constructed to protect human rights, especially in the political and civil realm, gain power through the use of acute language that refers to ‘human rights violations’ and identifies breaches as actions ‘against international law’. This language presumes the gravitas of an offense and suggests that repercussions will follow. Egregious cases can make their way to the International Criminal Court⁵ or, in the case of the Américas region, to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. The United States retains an observer status in both legal systems since it has not officially joined them.⁶

After the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, the UN drafted a series of core human rights treaties. These treaties are considered international laws and establish standards and expectations. The UN has nine core human rights treaties, each of which is monitored by a human rights treaty committee of independent experts (UN, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR, nd, a). The USA has a relatively bleak record of ratifying treaties compared to other similarly situated countries. However, it was actually one of the first nations to support the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), signing the treaty in 1966. Following its signature, the treaty underwent a lengthy ratification process in the USA: even though the government signed ICERD in 1966, it did not officially ratify the treaty until 1994 during the Clinton Administration.

OHCHR is the principal organ at the UN tasked with the promotion and monitoring of human rights. It describes human rights as follows:

Universal human rights are often expressed and guaranteed by law, in the forms of treaties, customary international law, general principles and other sources of international law. International human rights law lays down obligations of Governments to act in certain ways or to refrain from certain acts, in order to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals or groups. (UN, OHCHR, nd, b)

Given the UN’s governmentality structure, the OHCHR identifies governments as having ‘the primary responsibility to protect human rights (UN, OHCHR, nd, c); therefore the role of the OHCHR is to ‘provide assistance to Governments, such as expertise and technical trainings in the areas of administration of justice, legislative reform, and electoral process, to help implement international human rights standards on the ground’. By stressing the legality of human rights, the OHCHR serves to reinforce a modernist ontology based on the dualism of illegal versus legal. By primarily associating human rights with the legal apparatus, then laws, which rest on a modernist ontology, OHCHR becomes informed by those entities and social actors who create and interpret laws. Moreover, the legal systems that form to uphold those laws are often imperfect and discriminatory, with laws themselves being unevenly applied, observed, and enforced.

Given that these are dominant understandings to human rights, social actors in the other constellations have to be familiar with this methodology. They may opt to not engage in its mechanisms, even adopt an oppositional stance to this constellation, but even human rights production and practice in the counterpublic constellation are responding in some way to the dominant sphere. The rigidity of modernist ontology as it pertains to human rights law is based on a binary construction of illegal and legal or, as Mignolo (2009) frames it, between the ‘human’ and ‘non-human’.

Counterpublic Approaches

When Mignolo (2009) asked who speaks for the ‘human’ in human rights, he was referencing a context in which a majority of the world’s people – slaves, women, indigenous peoples, and so forth – had been entirely excluded from the discursive production of human rights. Hence, a counterpublic approach to human rights acknowledges not only these imperial origins but also the ways in which constituencies who were never viewed as having human rights in the 1940s during the drafting of the UDHR, assert them today.

This oppositional perspective correlates with what Arturo Escobar (2010) refers to as ‘the political activation of relational ontologies’. He states:

At stake in many cultural–political mobilizations in Latin America at present, it is argued, is the political activation of relational ontologies, such as those of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants. These relational ontologies can be differentiated from the dualist ontologies of liberal modernity in that they are not built on the divides between nature and culture, us and them, individual and community; the cultural, political, and ecological consequences of taking relationality seriously are significant; relationality refers to a different way of imagining life (socio-natural worlds). (p. 4)

This ‘political activation of relational ontologies’ emerges because indigenous communities and African descendants come to understand the socio-natural world contrarily to white Western men (Blaser, 2014; Escobar, 2010).

Movements and efforts to decolonize human rights are engaged in a practice of reclaiming human rights within the counterpublic constellation. Based on this research, this reclaiming can occur within the confines of institutions (Mignolo, 2009: 11, 21–2). As Mignolo (2009: 11) points out, decolonizing human rights can be about ‘placing yourself in the space [of] imperial discourse’ to ‘argue for radical interventions’ from the political perspective of marginalized communities. However, the counterpublic approach to human rights does not seek institutional validation. Rather, its purpose is to discursively produce and practice human rights in ways that can be inventive, generative, and dynamic. In this constellation, human rights are not just about legal norms but about an envisioning of human rights that moves beyond the rubric of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. To imagine human rights anew then requires the creation of new models of discursive production and practice.

The creation of something new involves the disruption, sometimes unexpectedly, of the status quo. Consider the bold actions of two indigenous (Mapuche) women from Chile during the Américas Preparatory Commission meeting for the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Santiago, Chile. During the opening session of the inter-governmental meeting, these two indigenous women ‘walked right up to the podium’ where the president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos, was about to speak and ‘denounced his treatment of Indians in Chile’ (interview with author, Oakland, CA, 6 February 2004). President Lagos was shocked by this political action and publicly reprimanded the women for ‘undiplomatic’ behavior after they were removed by security. But the representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in attendance applauded the courage of these women who had attempted to have their demands heard on their own terms, and the activists walked out in solidarity with them chanting, ‘We are a peoples!’, ‘End racism!’, and similar phrases (interview with author, Oakland, CA, 6 February 2004).⁷

Cariño’s point about ‘the daily business of human rights’ fundamentally speaks to advocating for human rights beyond a (white) Western-centric model. In doing so, the secular orientation of a modernist ontology is also challenged. Indigenous communities as well as African descendants in Latin America have been particularly active in this regard. For instance, indigenous communities in the Américas have made the assertion that land – as a being – also has rights (de la Cadena, 2010). African descendants in the region have also gained increased visibility since the 2001 WCAR and, in the process of preparing for the WCAR, not only embraced the term African descendant, but also demanded an engagement with human rights that acknowledged their history of enslavement. This recognition is significant because slavery received the classification of a ‘crime against humanity’ for the first time at the international level during the 2001 WCAR.

Of particular interest to this constellation are the politics of communities who at one time were not deemed as having human rights. During the negotiations about the drafting of the UN Charter in 1945, the primary writer of the preamble to the UN Charter, named Christiaan Smuts, was an outspoken segregationist. As the delegate from the Union of South Africa and as its former prime minister, a journalist at the time asked Smuts, who was of British heritage, ‘if he considered black persons human beings in the definition of the United Nations Charter he had drafted as chairman.’ Smuts replied with a resounding ‘no’.⁸

Another constituency who corresponds to the counterpublic constellation includes human rights artists. I interviewed a group of Peruvian human rights artists in 2013 about their efforts to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process and they spoke passionately about the urgency of art’s role in human rights. One of the artists said, ‘the most radical change, the deepest change, should be cultural’; his belief is that art is the ideal vehicle for this cultural transformation and that art ‘has a strong potential to deal with human rights issues’. For him, ‘Art itself is a human right’ and it promotes an essential ‘dynamic of creating dialogues between different activist agendas’ (interview with author, Lima, Perú, 27 June 2013).

The counterpublic constellation relies on relational ontologies because, as Maria Lugones (2010: 754) states, these approaches are about ‘beings in relation rather than dichotomously split over and over in hierarchically and violently ordered fragments’. As such, the discursive production and practice of human rights in this space is distinct from the other two constellations, especially as the first constellation (dominant understanding) relies on a clear division of legal and illegal and the third constellation (social praxis) strives to negotiate and mediate between modernist and relational ontologies. It is in the counterpublic constellation where decolonizing human rights becomes a pivotal undertaking.

These efforts to decolonize human rights – literally a ‘moving away (de-link) from the imperial consequences’ of the 1940s period (Mignolo, 2009: 11) – suggest that a ‘pluriversality of human rights,’ as Rosa-Linda Fregoso (2014) calls it, can co-exist with universal human rights. More importantly, the discursive production and practice of human rights in the counterpublic constellation is not wedded to the UN’s legalistic methodology nor does it seek to gain legitimacy or validation from the UN. In this counterpublic constellation, the discursive production and practice of human rights is largely irreconcilable with the dominant constellation; however, this tension is negotiated and contested within the social praxis constellation.

Social Praxis

The social praxis constellation sits between the first two constellations because it represents a process of mediation between the dominant understanding and counterpublic approach involving a distinct practice of human rights. Shannon Speed and Jane Collier (2000: 879) refer to this type of practice as the ‘social life of rights’ to signal the vibrancy upon which a multitude of social actors engage in the production of human rights (see also Wilson, 1997).

The intellectual efforts of those seeking to develop a framework for understanding the social life of rights would be better directed not towards foreclosing their ontological status, but instead by exploring their meaning and use. What is needed are more detailed studies of human rights according to the actions and intentions of social actors, within wider historical constraints of institutionalized power.

Focused on the violent situation in Chiapas, Mexico, Speed and Collier (2000: 878) address how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘can have the opposite effect of rendering indigenous leaders vulnerable to state sanctions’. In order to avoid ‘another form of colonialism’, which occurs when human rights are used to ‘impose Western values on unwilling peoples’, Speed and Collier contend it is incumbent to endorse the efforts of ‘indigenous groups in Chiapas [to] obtain the political autonomy they need to develop their own understandings of human rights’ so that the ‘cooperative efforts among groups with different histories and values … prevails.’

The social praxis is a constellation in which a form of political autonomy can thrive because social actors, from indigenous activists to African-descendants, are seeking to remake human rights. In other words, their engagement with the discursive production and organization of human rights is about offering their interpretation and perspectives to broaden narrow constructions of human rights. After all, human rights do not exist, as Richard Wilson (1997: 5) points out, ‘outside of discourse, history, context, or agency’. Efforts to put theories of human rights into practice often manifest as social struggles over power, political voice, and/or resources (Armaline and Glasberg, 2009; Armaline et al., 2012; Ishay, 2008). Further, the project of human rights includes metaphorical engagements with discourse as well.

Two examples of engagements in the social praxis constellation involve the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the political negotiations involving the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). First, the 2008 US government treaty review hearing before CERD offers critical insights into how human rights activism can result in an expanded interpretation of ICERD, making a treaty written in the 1960s applicable to the contemporary period. Second, the debates over the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples exemplify the deep tension between modernist and relational ontologies (UN, 2007; see also Barsh, 1996 and Pulitano, 2012).⁹ The two decades of fraught negotiations involving indigenous leaders underscore how dissatisfying navigating the social praxis constellation can be for activists.

The 2008 CERD Hearing of the US Government

CERD meetings occur semi-annually in Geneva at UN headquarters. Treaty compliance hearings are a venue in which the discourse of racism can be remade based on the expertise of committee members and activist engagements. Once ratified, governments agree to submit reports about their treaty compliance. Accredited NGOs also have an opportunity to submit their own assessment reports, known as ‘shadow reports’. The UN committee then subsequently reviews all the reports prior to the hearing. The US government has been reviewed three times thus far – the first time just weeks before the 2001 WCAR, the second time in 2008, and the third time in August 2014. The second hearing, held in February 2008 at UN headquarters in Geneva, was significant because of the record number of civil society participants (Falcón, 2009).

I observed the 2008 hearing along with over 120 other NGO representatives. After Fatima-Binta Victoria (Burkina Faso), the CERD chair, called the hearing into session, Special Rapporteur Linos-Alexander Sicilianos (Greece) summarized the committee’s assessment of the US government’s report on ICERD compliance. His opening presentation was wide-ranging in substance: he discussed the problematic ways in which the United States narrowly defines racial discrimination legally; the maltreatment of undocumented people and refugees, especially following the attacks on 11 September 2001; and the troubled US criminal justice system, in which racism is evidenced by high cases of police brutality against people of color, the overpopulation of people of color in prisons, and the overrepresentation of people of color on death row. Sicilianos also pointed out areas in which the government’s views differed from those of CERD and the substantive discrepancies that exist between the US government’s report and the NGO ‘shadow reports’. Some of the questions asked by Sicilianos and other CERD members to the US government representatives came directly from the language proposed by representatives of NGOs (Falcón, 2009).

Sicilianos’s opening presentation also highlighted issues previously overlooked by the committee in compliance hearings based on the intersection of race and gender. He first mentioned women of color in the context of ICERD article 5 and the ‘equal treatment before tribunals and other justice organs’. He noted that ‘women of color represent the fastest growing prison population and, secondly, that there is a disproportionate number of children of color sentenced to life without the possibility of release in the United States.’¹⁰ He referenced police brutality as an increasing concern to the committee, particularly with regard to brutality directed at transgender women of color:

There is overwhelming evidence, I must say, of police brutalities against racial and ethnic minorities, including African Americans, Arabs and Muslims, Latinos, Asian Americans, Natives, transgender women of color … I have received alarming information about abuses of transgender women of color.

It is these types of remarks that suggest expanding the communities affected by racism – in this case transgender women of color – is possible even in an institutional context that seems fixed or unchanging.

Sicilianos had an opportunity to ask a series of questions of the US government delegation that government representatives are in turn expected to answer the following day. The content of these questions demonstrates how NGO advocacy efforts can make an important intervention at the UN level. Below are just three examples of remarks made during the treaty compliance review hearing:

What measures have you taken regarding the re-entry of prisoners that does not aggravate the already disproportionate concentration of poverty in racial and ethnic communities?

Please also provide information on the measures the State party has undertaken to address the phenomenon of the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’, which seems to have an unjustifiable disparate impact on minority students.

Please explain whether there exists a general doctrine of ‘encroachment’ in the law of the State party as a justification for diminishing or extinguishing indigenous claims to land, including the legal basis for its application to Western Shoshone lands.

Unpacking all three questions illustrates the overlapping potential between the counterpublic approach and dominant understandings. The first question indicates that prisoners have human rights and thus should not be experiencing added punitive measures post-incarceration (Alexander, 2012). The USA has been relentless in adopting public policies that make it nearly impossible for non-punitive re-entry to occur, such as preventing former prisoners from accessing public housing and receiving social benefits. In terms of the second question, a UN committee member used the language of the advocates (‘school-to-prison pipeline’) to formulate his question. The ‘school to prison pipeline’ phenomenon has been long denied by the US government, but is one that activists of color working with urban youth know all too well. The third question contains the language from indigenous activists and their supporters (‘general doctrine of “encroachment”’), which refers to actions by the US government that likely most of the general public believe is in the past – the taking away or further displacement of indigenous peoples from their land. These types of remarks are ones in which the dominant interpretations of human rights are broadened (or challenged) and they impel the discourse of human rights to grapple with the realities of marginalized communities.

CERD’s final assessment of the hearing is presented in its concluding observations document. The contrast between the concluding observations from 2001, which covers the US government’s first treaty review hearing, and those from 2008 is salient in terms of substance and length. CERD discussed far more social issues in the 2008 review with the government than during the 2001 review, raising the stakes for government accountability. Interviewees attested to the greater significance of the 2008 concluding observations. One interviewee stated:

I think substantively the concluding observations were about as good as I’ve ever seen them coming out of the CERD and I definitely attribute some of the observations to the new members of CERD, who actively engaged in the discussion more than some of their predecessors. The concluding observations are fairly broad and more extensive than the first set of recommendations. (interview with author, Washington, DC, 5 May 2008)

Another interviewee concurred and stated, ‘Compared to the 2001 concluding observations, I thought the 2008 concluding observations were pretty strong’ (interview with author, New York City, 18 November 2008).

One of the more remarkable outcomes for feminist activists at the hearing was the inclusion of reproductive health as a racial justice matter. By accepting the principle that gender matters in discussions about racism and by utilizing a gender lens to examine issues previously not considered by CERD, the outcomes of the 2008 US treaty review hearing offer insight into how the social praxis constellation operates. In preparing for the treaty review process, US activists identified human rights standards based on the treaty and then formulated their advocacy to build on their assertions of racial injustice (Falcón, 2009). In other words, there is no mention of reproductive rights in ICERD; yet activists offered their interpretations of ICERD in which reproductive justice could be applied. Their efforts were compelling enough to CERD that these issues received attention during the hearing itself. This strategy necessitates a fluency in the language of human rights and the ability to negotiate and lobby with members of a UN committee.

At the same time, the treaty review process can feel insufficient. For instance, a participant stated:¹¹

I felt like there wasn’t enough opportunity for CERD to come back and challenge the US’s responses again. It almost felt like the US got to have the last word even though their answers were so incomplete or ridiculous in a lot of instances … or insulting. So I found the structure of it wanting in that way. (phone interview with author, 16 December 2008)

This structural limitation should not suggest, however, that the efforts endured in this context are not helpful because activists are able to participate in renewed advocacy efforts once they return home.

The UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The contentious negotiations between government delegates and indigenous leaders over the adoption of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provide another example of engagement in the social praxis constellation. The disputes that surfaced in relation to the Indigenous Peoples Declaration were over ‘fundamental philosophical issues’ (Barsh, 1996: 783) that divided the government delegates (consider the second constellation), who were tasked with preserving the power of their nation-states, from the indigenous leaders, who were seeking to uphold self-determination, autonomy, and the inherent dignity of indigenous peoples (see Sanders, 1994). Arguments about the definition of terms such as ‘indigenous’, ‘the right to self-determination’, and ‘collective rights versus individual rights’, and whether or not to use the term ‘peoples’ (plural), led to the extensive length of the negotiations.

During negotiations, the issue of land received considerable attention because it ‘goes beyond [the] traditional idea of human rights’ (Barsh, 1996: 801). When some participants raised serious concerns about the appropriateness of including a provision about land in a Declaration on Indigenous Peoples, the government delegate of Bolivia pointed out that land and indigenous culture are intertwined (Barsh, 1996: 801). Further, some negotiators thought that expanding the traditional description of human rights was a positive development, as Alfonso Martinez, one of the UN negotiators, believed. But several government delegates vehemently disagreed. In the end, although the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed with much fanfare at the UN General Assembly in 2007, the compromises that had to be made to achieve the near consensus suggest that reconciling modernist and relational views can be a challenging task (see Face and Wobaga, 2013; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Consider the breakdown of the vote: in September 2007, after 20 years of difficult deliberations, four countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) voted against adopting the Declaration, 143 countries voted in favor, and 11 countries abstained. Its mixed reception by indigenous leaders included some hailing the Declaration as a long overdue achievement and others considering it to be ‘a deeply flawed document’ that they could not endorse (Face and Wobaga, 2013).

The contentious negotiations between government delegates and indigenous representatives over the adoption of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples provide an example of the tensions that can emerge in the social praxis constellation. The two decade long debate exemplifies the deep divide between modernist and relational ontologies. Introducing the issue of land into a debate about human rights – in particular because of the role land plays in the lives of indigenous peoples and because they view land on a par with the worth of people – is noteworthy; however, compromises were made that still favored Western-based understandings of land and the law. For example, Article 10 of the Indigenous Declaration addresses issues of forcible removal stating the following: ‘Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option of return.’ In this Article, the language is such that indigenous peoples can still be removed from their land, albeit not ‘forcibly removed’, though the meaning of this term is not entirely clear. More importantly, the wording of this Article in no way protects indigenous peoples over, for example, corporate desires to extract natural resources from indigenous lands. Other Articles in the Declaration about land are similar in terms of intent – with the appearance of concern for the plight of indigenous peoples and understanding or respecting the ‘distinctive spiritual relationships’ (Article 25) with land yet not at the expense of sacrificing Western beliefs about individual land ownership or corporate expansion. This Declaration should in no way be considered a decolonial platform even though a progressive Declaration about the rights of indigenous peoples would centralize the project of decoloniality.

The social praxis constellation is the space in which activists who opt to engage in UN advocacy strive to reconcile dominant understandings and counterpublic approaches. In their advocacy, they take the platforms, inspirations, values, ethics, and ideas from the counterpublic constellation and use them to decipher how dominant understandings of human rights can be challenged, re-interpreted, and re-imagined. In the two examples discussed here, the outcomes of the social praxis constellation can be constructive, as was the case for some US feminists who participated in the ICERD review hearing, and frustrating, which was the case for numerous indigenous leaders.

Conclusion

The three constellations of human rights discussed in this article – dominant understandings, counterpublic approaches, and social praxis – offer a means with which to analyze the advocacy efforts of the different constituencies engaged with the manner in which human rights has been institutionally constructed vis-à-vis the UN. It is critical to understand how human rights are made meaningful when ‘the actions and intentions of social actors’, those who are not UN diplomats or government bureaucrats, are central (Speed and Collier, 2000: 879). The purpose of conceptualizing human rights as a constellations model is because engagement with human rights is not singular. It involves discourse, political advocacy, distinct approaches, and tensions about its very meaning.

The constellations of human rights are meant to offer a framework in which to recognize dissimilar types of engagement in a shared space in such a way that does not render one approach as better than another; however, there is a level of incompatibility between two of the constellations (dominant and counterpublic). A constellations model underscores that these different strands come together to provide us with a nuanced understanding of the discursive production and practice of human rights in the contemporary period.

The article’s intent is to move beyond a narrow political discourse about human rights based on a tradition of liberal humanism. The discursive production of a seemingly progressive, and occasionally radical concept of human rights has gained some of its force because a powerful multilateral institution supports it. Therefore, even when social actors engage with human rights that seem disconnected from the UN’s approach, such as in the counterpublic constellation, their methodology still in some way speaks back to the dominant understandings of human rights. The two examples discussed in this article demonstrate how the process of mediation occurs within this space.

This research is drawn to the social praxis constellation in particular because of the critical moments in which a seemingly fixed discourse can be re-made to the benefit of communities that were entirely ignored in the 1940s. By focusing on the discursive production and organization of human rights, this research demonstrates that the landscape of human rights is being continually remade. Rather than situating human rights as static, this research aims to emphasize that a level of fluidity can emerge when we pay particular attention to the intentions of a range of social actors who engage in the discursive production and practice of human rights today.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks go to Molly Talcott, Dana Collins, Sharmila Lodhia, and Rosa-Linda Fregoso for their feedback on earlier versions of this article and their unwavering support. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article.

Funding

I would like to acknowledge the funding support from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Fellowship, the UC Santa Cruz Committee on Research Special Research Grant, the Hellman Fellows Program, the UC Humanities Research Institute Grant, the UC Office of the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the UC Santa Barbara Humanities and Social Science Research Grant.

Notes

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