Girls rising for human rights: Not magic,politics

Abstract

“Girls rising” offers a grounded, critical, and human rights theory of political responsibility for global injustice. This theory of human rights tells us not just what rights are but how to take responsibility for bringing about their enjoyment for all. It grounds a theory of human rights in the political view of human beings as fundamentally relational and human rights as fundamentally collectively enjoyed. Using girls’ education activism as an illustrative issue area, it outlines five political practices and what they tell us about how to take political responsibility for human rights, in a rights-based way.

Keywords

Critical theory development human rights praxis responsibility

Introduction

Girls’ education has been a recurring darling of corporate social responsibility philanthropy. From Nike’s 2008 “Girl Effect” campaign¹ to KPMG’s 2013 support of the “Because I am a Girl” campaign (KPMG International, 2014), the path to development is through the school of a girl. However, the role of human rights in promoting girls’ education has been limited to their “right to education.”² Yet, as Nike found during their initial investment in girls’ education, the path is neither direct nor certain. It is not direct because the meaning of development is politically contested. And it is not certain because the key to development is not girls’ education alone, but rather all the other aspects of rights enjoyment taken together. Molly (2013) Melching found this in her efforts to change a cultural practice:

For many years, our education program did not include discussions on basic human rights. We were successful, but it was only after introducing human rights learning that an amazing thing happened. I can’t explain it. It felt like magic. (2013: xi)

In fact, it wasn’t magic; it was politics. The political understanding of human rights is the foundation of a rights-based approach to responsibility.

Across time, geography, and politics, theorists, policy makers, citizens, development practitioners, and rabble rousers have argued or assumed that education is important to individual and political life such that we are comfortable seeing education referred to unproblematically as foundational to human rights and development. However, we should rely on neither education nor human rights to work magic. Change comes through politics.

Consistent with the range of actors who use human rights, the “we” of this essay is a political “we” that includes theorists, policy makers, citizens, development practitioners, and rabble rousers who do not share a common political community but who share a political concern for human rights. I argue that this concern for human rights requires a politics of human rights, based not in the power relations and normalization of the neo-liberal political economy as feminists and critical theorists have worried³ but rather in the political strategies and alliances for transforming these.

Whether imperial or emancipatory, there are two parts to a theory of human rights: (1) the moral theory that humanity needs to arrange itself politically, economically, and socially so that all humans can live a life worthy of being called human and (2) the political theory of what political, economic, and social arrangements best achieve that life. While theorizing of the first kind can be engaged in alone, from an arm chair or on a walk in the woods, the second requires deep engagement with the power dynamics and relations in the world, with the public and with its problems (Dewey, [1927] 1954). Without such engagement, a human rights theory and practice may reify oppressive hierarchies and norms.

This theory-in-practice entails taking responsibility for unjust power relations, engaging with them while trying to change them. This latter cannot be done by “the admission of the [individual] claimant to the position of the subject of a widely available benefit or position” (Douzinas, 2007: 107). However, my reasons for arguing so are different from those of Douzinas. For Douzinas, the problem with Rancière’s effort to reclaim a critical politics of human rights is that Rancière seems naive to the impossibility of transforming power relations through a mechanism that requires taking up a particular subject position. Douzinas (2007) is right: there are many who are “outside Rancière’s regime of visibility” (2007: 107). However, in his account of the politics of human rights, Douzinas contributes to that regime of invisibility of human rights claimants by denying that the form of politics in which they engage is a human rights politics.

I argue that a grounded political theory of human rights provides a rights-based approach to responsibility for human rights.⁴ This political understanding of rights has guided the design and implementation of development policy and political action in international conventions, been adopted as the guiding principles of institutions such as the United Nations (UN) (and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UNWomen, International Labour Organization (ILO), and United Nations Security Council (UNSC)), and been articulated and rearticulated through the activism of “new” rights activists, including women, children, lesbians, gays, people who identify as bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer, people with disabilities, workers, indigenous people, and others whose political rights are tenuous (Bob, 2009).⁵ Of course, among those who use “human rights” discourse, some do not use it in the transformative sense I develop in this article, but many do, particularly “new” rights advocates and those allied with them as the quest for visibility require the political transformation of the rights-based approach.

The political (as in the social and collective, not just individual) understanding of human rights is essential for human rights to be an appropriate guide for responsibility for injustice. The approach is consistent with a range of approaches to human rights theory that vary in their intellectual and theological commitments, but share the view of human beings as fundamentally relational and human rights as fundamentally collectively enjoyed.⁶ This approach is also attentive to a critical caution against fetishizing about “rights” at the expense of the democratic politics that insure their enjoyment.⁷

As noted above, there are moral and political dimensions to a human rights argument. Often theorists focus their arguments on the moral questions and leave the political question to politics (Sen, 2004). Here, I follow Sen (2009) in accepting that the moral questions, while important, do not need to be reconciled before engaging in the relevant politics.⁸ Moreover, perhaps some aspects of moral relevance can be revealed only through political engagement and the empirical evidence of what is at stake (Ackerly and Attanasi, 2009). This approach, grounded normative theorizing, yields insights that can and should be put in conversation with moral philosophy. Such an engagement is outside the scope of this article.

This article argues that the struggles themselves can provide guidelines for a practice of political responsibility for injustice without prior agreed or shared principles of justice. Human rights analysis can provide guidance on how to take responsibility for injustice even if we are not sure of all the dimensions and causes of that injustice and even if we cannot know all the political obstacles our efforts may confront. We can learn more from what girls confront in struggle for their rights than we can from what donors take from their stories in order to mobilize support for their struggles.

A critical theory of human rights: Grounded and normative

How do we take responsibility for injustice when the sources of injustice are embedded in our values, practices, and norms? The politics of human rights cries out for a map to guide us through the complexity of power relations and their internalization through normalization of social, economic, and political hierarchies. However, we do not need to be handed this map before we depart.⁹ We can map as we go. The political theory of human rights can be richly informed by the complexity of multiple forces of injustice and still guide our taking responsibility for injustice.

Before providing a politically rich and deeply engaged theory of human rights, I consider a less conceptually challenging approach which simplifies the account of injustice and whose appeal can be measured by its popularity. The popular book and related media generated by Nicholas Kristof and Sheila WuDunn (2009) provide an example of simplification. Their account provides measures of harm and stories of individuals suffering from poverty and gender-based violence. The account consistently lacks analysis of the processes of injustice and the causes of poverty and gender-based violence. Momm, who returns to prostitution after being rescued by Kristof, was “neither acting freely nor enslaved.” She returns to prostitution because of her meth addition and stays until “the Cambodian authorities reacted to growing Western pressure by cracking down on sex trafficking” (2009: 40).

Moreover, their account consistently obfuscates the political acts of those engaged in trying to address these background causes. For example, they portray the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) as a non-government organization (NGO) that has “dazzled scholars and foundations” (2009: xx), rather than a trade union for self-employed workers taking on the power relations of the informal economic which is how they portray themselves.¹⁰

A political theory of human rights need to neither simplify the complex dynamics nor obfuscate the extent of social, economic, and political transformation necessary in order for it to be accessible to theorists, policy makers, citizens, development practitioners, and rabble rousers. Using a grounded approach to normative theorizing, we can interpret the normative insights of those in struggle from their actions and use their insights to guide our taking responsibility for injustice. Those who struggle against injustice offer a map which provides a guide for how the rest of us can join in their struggle and take up responsibility for injustice. In the remainder of this section, I set out the grounded critical approach to human rights, and in the following section, I show how it guides responsibility.

Grounded normative theory is a critical theoretical project in that like Marxist, Foucauldian, and decolonizing approaches to theory, it analyzes the normative values and political theory within political practice. Yet, it differs from these in that it looks within these not just to reveal within our practices values that we would shun if made aware of them but also to reveal within practices those values that we would embrace as our own, values that do offer us a glimpse of the world we want to build and share.

Nothing in a grounded approach per se makes it a social justice view. As Wendy Brown (2004; see also Cohen, 2004) describes it, Michael Ignatieff’s theory of human rights is grounded and emaciated, having a minimalist view of what we can hope for from a theory of rights.¹¹ Ignatieff’s (2001) grounded approach constrains the meaning of human rights by the power of those who would oppress overtly or covertly. Moreover, he is silent on matters of normalization and power relations. Therefore, his scope of human activism is limited only to the terrains of dispute in which oppressors engage. Constructivist international relations theory theorizes about the political processes that lead to this engagement, but even these positive theories do not imbue this engagement with normative import (Risse-Kappen et al., 2013). Ignatieff’s grounded approach to human rights is over-determined by the perspective of the relatively more powerful international relations.

By contrast, the critical theory of human rights is grounded in the politics of struggle for the visibility of people to make rights claims, for the visibility of their issues as rights, for their capacity to be self-advocates (without risk of torture), for the ability to build networks of allies, and for their ability to learn from their struggles, successes, and failures.¹² This can take two forms: the discursive approach of which seeks the foundations of human rights revealed in the discursive struggles for meaning¹³ and the political approach which reveals the meaning of rights in what actors say and do.¹⁴ The concern of a struggle-based approach to rights is with the ways in which other accounts of injustice, while intending to promote justice or humanitarian responses to injustice, exhibit a form of imperial humanitarianism or “humanitarian imperialism” (Brown, 2000; D’Costa, 2013). Attentive to this risk, a critical theory of human rights cannot have an anchor because while an anchor prevents a boat from getting blown away when the winds are strong and the crew needs to rest or repair the ship, in the anchorage, the boat does not go forward. Change cannot occur while the ship is at anchor. Therefore, while it may be comfortable and consistent with other approaches to theorizing to think of human rights as anchors (or “trumps”), in a critical approach human rights function as a hand-drawn map. By such a map, we get our bearings and chart a course toward more justice.¹⁵

This rights-based approach “map” has some discernible features that are important for knowing where we are, but also for knowing what needs to change. Rights without equality are privileges; therefore, human rights are interdependent and we need to be aware of the connections among the rights claims of various people. Rights enjoyment requires the enjoyment of all rights; therefore, human rights are indivisible and we need to be aware of the connections among rights. The enjoyment of rights relies on the conditions of their enjoyment, and therefore, human rights are enjoyed through the enabling conditions of human life, that is, they depend on rights supporting institutions, values, practices, norms, individual behaviors, and the aggregate impact of social behavior.¹⁶

This means that a human rights theory entails a theory of responsibility that calls not only on those who are directly responsible for certain actions but also on all of humanity. A theory of human rights is not a theory about what we have a right to; rather, it is a theory about what we have rights for. That is, a critical theory of human rights is not a theory of entitlements, but rather a theory of what we and others are able to do in the world with and for each other.

It is a theory of what we need to be for each other, of what we need to do to support and build our processes and relations so that they tie us together as we work for our rights and the rights of others.¹⁷ And we enjoy human rights in this way because they are interdependent, interrelated, and indivisible. To use a theoretical language that is not used by Anglo-American rights theorists, but is more consistent with the values and practices of rights activists, human rights theory is a dao—a way—a way of living together with critical attention to how others among us are living. A critical theory of human rights uses rights not as a banister or an anchor but as a map of our own village, hand-drawn in the dirt with a stick while we discuss the layout, its power relations of our village, and our hopes and dreams for our children. Changing the world requires charting a new course (or new courses) and creating new paths, not necessarily just making the current ones more tenable for those disadvantaged by the hierarchies.

In the next section, I draw on grounded work with women’s human rights activists to describe the implications of a critical theory of human rights for how we promote human rights. In what follows, I focus on girls’ education. In the conclusion, I offer a brief reflection on one way in which the human rights responsibilities may be particularly difficult for an academic.

A rights-based approach to responsibility: A grounded and normative approach to girls’ education

Theorists, policy makers, citizens, development practitioners, and rabble rousers want to respond to injustice although our knowledge of the injustices in the world and any skeletal account of its dimensions are insufficient to guide us in ways that could transform the world. We may turn to education as a way of taking responsibility because whatever else needs to change, education will be also important. As Nike and Molly Melching found, much has to change in our local and global political economies and cultures to bring about the rights enjoyment of girls. We need not just analyze, but to be part of, the forces that act through and seek to change our collective lives. Justice requires a rights-based approach because a rights-based approach engages all the forces not only of injustice but also of potential change. To play on the biological metaphor, justice is not merely getting the skeleton right or healing a broken bone, but rather requires engaging the senses, circulatory system, muscles, tendons, and brain to change how the whole body functions, that is, to enable healthy living, not merely to provide healing. Taking responsibility for injustice means taking responsibility for political transformation.

Scholars as different from each other as John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Charles Mills have argued that to build a just world, we need to transform the power relations of our societies. Such transformation is a political challenge, not a technical one. Therefore, how to take responsibility for injustice is part of the theory of responsibility. In the remainder of the article, I outline what responsibility for injustice looks like when the sources of injustice are embedded in our values, practices, and norms.

In a 2011 essay, I describes five practices of women’s human rights activism, arguing that these provide standards by which to assess whether an organization that claims to do “rights-based” work does so in practice or merely exploits the discourse of human rights for political purposes (Ackerly, 2011a: 229–236). The language I use to describe these five practices is familiar to feminist academics, NGOs, private funders, and donor agencies. Although the language is familiar in these circles, the ideas travel well outside these circles. In this essay, I build on this typology, arguing that the responsibility for injustice entails engaging in political struggles for justice using the rights-based approach. The remainder of the essay clarifies what that requires while expanding on the language I use to describe this work. I want to invite us to destabilize even familiar ideas as we think about what it means to take up responsibility in a rights-based way. Therefore, I use metaphors from the physiology of the human body in an effort to expand our shared language for discussing these ideas, at least cautioning us not to rely on familiar interpretations of these ideas without thinking through their importance in order to destabilize existing power relations and to build political community.

Throughout the exposition, I discuss a manifestation of the movement in support of girls’ education. This is a broad movement with new actors entering all the time. It is a field of activism, scholarship, philanthropy, and global politics. To focus the discussion, I use a film Girl Rising that has been used as a tool for informing a lay popular Western audience about the problems of girls’ education. In Girl Rising, the personal stories of nine girls are integrated into a movie narrative about the importance of girls’ education. Told through documentaries with high production values, these personal stories of particular girls facing social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental obstacles to education, the movie is a call to fund girls’ education.¹⁸ The references to systemic forces which impede girls’ access to education are woven throughout each documentary segment although the overall narrative of the film taken as a whole puts the burden of change on the agency and the will of donors and the girls themselves. Moreover, the differences between the issues in the featured countries Cambodia, Nepal, Afghanistan, Egypt, Sierra Leone, India, Haiti, Peru, and Ethiopia while certainly discussed and certainly differences that one would need to pay attention to in addressing obstacles to education in any particular place are not the emphasis of the movie. The narrative of the movie is the simplifying narrative of girls denied.

Other popularizations of women’s rights issues are in circulation. I chose Girl Rising because unlike Half the Sky which leaves the political and economic dimensions of gender inequality unexamined, the NGOs filmed in Girl Rising demonstrate an engagement with the structural dimensions of the injustices to which they draw our attention and because Girl Rising shows the politics of girls speaking up for themselves, not being rescued by others. However, it is not enough to draw attention to structural dimensions. In fact, given the power relations of these structures, the narrative of the documentary is misleading. It is inappropriate to rely on “the power of one girl to make a difference.”¹⁹ Combating human rights is a collective struggle. Engaging in that struggle in a rights-based way is the foundation of responsibility for injustice.

Intersectionality—The sensory system of justice

Human rights are interdependent, violated through direct actions and through complex processes and relations. Intersectional analysis and political action reach across subgroups within societies and to subgroups excluded from societies. Oppression and exclusion can be concealed through normalization. Normalization can be used, as Iris Marion Young (2006) does following Foucault (1978), Butler (1990), and Warner (1999) as a concept related to the politics of recognition of people: “Normalization consists in a set of social processes that elevate the experience and capacities of some social segments into standards used to judge everyone” (2006: 95). The notion relevant to a rights-based approach to responsibility is broader and refers not just to recognizing the capacities, standards, and judgments of people but also to recognizing the ways in which social norms render certain injustices invisible. Normalization can make some injustices so familiar as to be outside of reflections of justice.

Responsibility for human rights means being responsive to the pain of injustice. Taking responsibility for injustice through normalization means deconstructing normalization in order to reveal its consequences. We have to take political responsibility for the processes of normalization before anyone or any collective can take responsibility for changing their consequences. We are responsible for seeking out where the pain is, whether it is new pain or it has been there all along. The political approach to grounded human rights theorizing tells us to look for where people are in struggle. It also tells us to look out for injustices that may be invisible or not seen because processes of normalization render them so.

Feminist research has established that intersectional observations and analysis are important to identifying where we need to be concerned about potentially invisible injustice. For example, Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) drew our attention to the problems of racism within some feminist framings of injustice and sexism within some criticisms of racism. Nancy Hirschmann (2008) cautions that we are better able to analyze the intersections of race and gender than those of class.

Girl Rising features, Suma, a girl from Nepal. Her family lives in poverty; her having been sold into slavery is a function of gender, poverty, and caste. Her slavery is the obstacle to her education. All these issues are conveyed in the movie. Yet, the simplifying narrative of the movie is that education of girls requires foreign money and the will of each girl to rise up. However, given the structural dimensions of gender, poverty, and caste, these cannot be addressed with money and individual will alone. The system of enslavement of girls is part of the caste system and poverty. These require social transformation. In the movie, girls go together to demand the freedom of another enslaved girl from her master. The girls’ local activism for girls’ education is intersectional, taking on poverty and the caste-bondage system. External support for girls’ education should similarly be intersectional. Intersectionality is essential for a rights-based approach to responsibility.

Issue by issue, we find evidence that previous failure to address an injustice as an intersectional issue results in persistent injustice. Consider, for example, the AIDS crisis among poor women and the social processes around the study of AIDS which explain why the AIDS crisis went unnoticed for its first decade even while research was drawing attention to the sociological dimensions of the spread of AIDS in other populations (Farmer, 1992; Farmer et al., 2011; Treichler, 1999). Or consider the evidence that poor women are eight times as likely to die in natural disaster as men (Neumayer and Plümper, 2007). Combined, gender and poverty contribute to higher rates of mortality, making mortality in natural disaster an issue of justice and responsibility, not just of bad luck.

Intersectionality provides more than merely a superficial or descriptive account of injustice; it also gives us the analytical tools to see which forces are at work and why. If a theory of human rights is to guide our human rights–defending practices, a rights-based approach to responsibility includes intersectional observations and analyses.

Cross-issue awareness—The circulatory system

Human rights are indivisible, that is, no right is secure if all rights are not secure. As we saw above, we can apply the tools and the experience of intersectional analysis in one issue area to others. Another way to take responsibility for human rights is to use cross-issue awareness to find some rights violated or groups of people whose rights are violated.

Consider when we work responsibly on any aspect of human rights—poverty (Pogge, [2002] 2008), disease (Farmer, 2005), environmental change (Caney, 2009; Hall and Weiss, 2012; Weston et al., 2009), or education—we need to be aware of the connections across these. Girls denied education confront poverty, enslavement, child marriage, environmental disaster, war sexual harassment, and gender-oppressive cultural norms. Each of the girls’ stories highlights one or more of these themes.

In Girl Rising, the connections among them—for example, between environmental disaster and poverty—are assumed and not interrogated. By contrast, images of cultural backwardness obfuscate the more systematic connection between issues. For example, in Nepal, the caste system legally binds a certain caste of girls to a master, and in Afghanistan, the gendered practice of child marriage legally binds young girls to older husbands. If we are concerned about oppression, then we need to take responsibility not only for the issues of injustice and their complexity but also for the global power relations embedded in our characterizations of that injustice. Girl Rising’s characterization of girls’ vulnerability and inability to help themselves combined with the empathetic voiceover of the narrator who is recognizably the White Irish actor, Liam Neeson, performs the aspirationally progressive, yet racist, politics that prompted Gayatri Spivak (1988) to summarize her feminist and post-colonial criticism with her now famous derisive quip about “white men saving brown women from brown men” (1988: 297).

Attention to girls’ education, as opposed to education more generally, is an intersectional approach to education and therefore exhibits the first aspect of a rights-based approach to responsibility—that is, intersectionality. However, responsibility requires more than that first dimension. To take responsibility for injustice, we need to analyze the connections across issues (between natural disaster and poverty, for example), so that as we address one issue, we do so in a way that can actually be transformative of power relations.

Capacity-building and partnerships—The muscles of responsibility

As we have seen, human rights enjoyment and their violation are interrelated. The rights of none are secure if the rights of all are not secure. This means that we all need to be able to exercise our rights in order for any of us to have them, in a meaningful sense.

One trailer for Girl Rising begins with the story of Malala Yousafzai, “a student who wanted to learn.” This is a mischaracterization the Nobel Prize winning girls’ rights activist from Afghanistan (Yousafzai and Lamb, 2013). At 15 years, she was an activist, radio commentator, public speeker, and blogger who sought to strengthen the capacity of girls to be their own self-advocates. Although mentioned in a Girl Rising’s promotional trailer, Yousafzai’s story is not featured in Girl Rising. However, in the film, Mariama, like Malala, comes from a context of militarized civil conflict. Like Malala, Mariama’s medium is radio. The account of the radio programming and its organization is left out of the movie, but clearly there is a movement organization behind the radio program because even when Mariama is not on the air, she is able to listen to the program with her mother and father. Additionally, Girl Rising highlights the work of an NGO that relies on former bonded laborers to pressure masters to release their slaves and a radio program in which girls give each other advice about how to confront rights violations. The importance of girls’ collective capacities is a subtext in many of Girl Rising’s stories, but it is not part of the marketing materials or the narrative of the movie. By contrast, a rights-based approach to girls’ education includes capacity-building of girls as individual and as collective political actors.

In taking responsibility for human rights, awareness of injustice is not where the action is. If our rights are being violated, we don’t need the news media to tell us. We live it. In order to enjoy our rights, we need to be able to defend them. For human rights to be secure, we need others to be able to defend their rights too. We all need to be able to defend each other’s rights. In this sense, human rights, all human rights, not just the right to association, are collective rights. If we do not take responsibility for them collectively, none of us has them. This politics contributes to the need for the distinction between de jure and de facto human rights.

Intersectional analysis and cross-issue inquiry are essential for being politically responsible for injustice because they deepen and broaden our awareness of injustices and our understanding of its sources as complex and political, but they are not sufficient for taking responsibility for injustice. Collectively, we need the capacity to bring about change. This means we need to be able to work in partnerships: building our own and building on one another’s strengths.

On one hand, this means that people who feel they can enjoy their rights need to work to enable others to enjoy their rights. That seems kind of obvious. But what does that really entail? One method of capacity-building comes through the transfer of the privilege of some to the benefit of others. People with one kind of privilege or another (perhaps a professional training in law or medicine, perhaps the political security of being in exile or of having political and economic allies) speak out for human rights; the rights they know are not secure unless the rights of all are secure. These are human rights defenders.²⁰ Of course having rights is “instrumental to the defense of human rights.”²¹ Those rights that are essential to enjoying all rights include “inter alia, freedom of association, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to gain access to information, to provide legal aid and to develop and discuss new ideas in the area of human rights” (Office of the High Commission on Human Rights, 2011). This is the focus of capacity-building of most human rights activism through formal UN institutions.

Girl Rising portrays many partnerships, and it was produced through many partnerships. In addition to the NGO and documentary filmmaker partnerships used to produce the film, there are partnerships for the film’s distribution and for its use in educational settings.

Responsible work for human rights means building the capacity of all to be self-advocates and working in partnership across issues and identity groups to address the complex forces of injustice. Just as the theory of human rights requires that we look beyond the skeleton for the complex forces contributing to injustice, responsibility for human rights requires martialing complex forces as well. Capacity-building and partnerships are the muscle of responsibility for human rights.

Networking and alliances—The tendons of responsibility for human rights

Human rights are interdependent, indivisible, and interrelated; human rights are enjoyed collectively or not secure for anyone. Therefore, political responsibility for human rights entails networking with those who are not initially like-minded. Building relations across hierarchies transform those hierarchies.

Such networking is a difficult work. It requires reaching out to those who have an interest in education or gender-based violence and having the difficult conversation about why working on these issues requires working on human rights. Disturbingly, for many who work for human rights, it requires reaching out to policy makers in ways that may instrumentalize human rights and even the people whose rights violations are being addressed. Promoting global public health requires allies taking on poverty and political hierarchies (Farmer, 2005). Likewise, human rights responsibility requires reaching out to those interested in education and poverty reduction and explaining why this means ensuring reproductive rights for women and thus profound social change in most contexts.

Girl Rising says “one girl with courage is a revolution.” But of course that is not true. One girl with courage is lonely. Girl Rising, its NGO partners, and donors practice networking, but the import of such networks is hardly transparent in the movie portrayal of the activism of the NGO partners. However, building networks and alliances is essential for taking responsibility for human rights because it transforms the political landscape for all advocating for rights.

Given the politics of change, it may be difficult for certain actors to build networks or to transform networks into partnerships. For example, in a socially conservative context, a health rights advocate may be politically intimidated from reaching out to sexuality rights advocates (Rothschild et al., 2005). In a context of faith-based networks, it may be difficult for fundraisers to talk about education as a human rights issue if their audience associates “rights” with transformation in traditional gender norms. These potential allies may be able to partner on worker justices issues (as they did on the activism in support of ILO Convention 189 on the right to decent work for domestic workers). However, such networks may or may not develop into long-term partnerships working on the full range of human rights. They may be politically risky or take time, an activist’s most scarce resource.

It may be that the role of network building is better done by large donors (such as the Gates Foundation) with economic power that is relatively less tied to political constraints than that of donors such as UNICEF or the World Bank whose governance structures make them accountable to national governments whose interests may be challenged by a rights-based approach (or whose democratic support may be contingent on more conservative social politics).

In this light, those who are politically restrained have a political responsibility to identify potential partners, but to pursue them only opportunistically. Those who, due to relations of economic and political power, have relatively more political autonomy have a particular role in facilitating networking. However, as I discuss in the next section, learning and critical thinking means that for none of us are our responsibilities for human rights limited to our roles. These roles are part of the structures of normalization, and so these too have to be subjects of criticism.

Learning through critical reflection—The cognitive system of responsibility

Human rights are interdependent, indivisible, interrelated, collective, and dynamic and complex. In light of this theory of human rights, responsibility for human rights must include commitment to self-reflectiveness about conscious and second nature (or normalized) values. It means that responsibility for human rights entails treating every such understanding as provisional, able to be destabilized by fresh intersectional analysis, provoked by new cross-issue awareness, stimulated by a new partnership, and developed through ever broadening networks. The experiences of highlighting intersectionality, working across issues, developing partnerships, and explaining oneself to potential networks are challenging cognitive experiences. They are also opportunities for capacity-building in each of those areas.

Therefore, whatever else a person or group of people do for human rights, they exhibit a rights-based approach to responsibility if they do so in a way that enables them, their partners, and their networks to learn from and strengthen each other. And this is why I “pick” on Girl Rising here. It has been an effective tool for fundraising. It is proud of “over $ 2.1 million in inspired donations.”²² Does it have a rights-based approach? A learning approach? Well, it doesn’t seem to want to teach. However, teaching is not a rights-based responsibility, capacity-building is. Teaching may be one way of capacity-building, but it is not the only way. In the “Conclusion” section, I discuss whether our learning from my critical analysis of Girl Rising should be the criticism of how the movie took up responsibility for rights violations or should it be the insights into how to take up responsibility for rights violations ourselves. In exercising our responsibilities for human rights, we learn to build pathways with others, connect with humanity, and build the capacities of others.

Conclusion

This article uses a range of ways of taking up responsibility for injustice that people actually take up across contexts as a tool for critically assessing one example of doing so. Despite its connection to activism, a critical theory of human rights does not rely for its theoretical justification on the effectiveness of rights-based strategies. The complexity of the environments in which social movements operate means that there are many other factors that contribute to the effectiveness of a political initiative (Ackerly, 2009). Differences among groups and the contexts of their work are empirically interesting and normatively provocative, but the fact that bringing about transformative political change is difficult is not a basis for criticizing the normative aspiration of doing so.

Human rights is at once a critical practice, a discursive practice that supports the critical practice, a discursive practice that subverts the critical practice, and a historical construction with multiple meanings. When we talk about human rights, any number of those meanings can be evoked. Some activists, philanthropists, and policy makers (like Kristof and WuDunn and Girl Rising) shy away from a rights-based approach. Others, like UNICEF whose mission is guided by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), cannot shy away from a rights-based approach.²³ The normative and political implications of a grounded critical theory are quite prescriptive: global justice theory must entail a theory of responsibility for injustice, not just make room for one. Furthermore, that theory of responsibility is rights-based when it tells us how to take up responsibility for injustice responsibly. It also provides us with a guideline (provisional, but rights-informed) for how to evaluate acts of responsibility for justice. The normative implications are strong but also vague in a good way.

Let’s go back to Half the Sky and Girl Rising. According to a rights-based responsibility, the analyses in the book and film are incomplete. However, as a theory of responsibility one which invites all of humanity to take up responsibility, this cannot be a full-on indictment of their approaches. Certainly, the argument presented here tells us how they could make their work more responsible. However, it also encourages us not to devote our reflections on their work for popular audiences to criticism. Academics, filmmakers, journalists, and activists are building a network of political community together (Ackerly, 2011a, 2011b). Those of us who see more complexity than more popularized visions portray need to work in partnerships and alliances with these approaches and with other approaches. While my normative sympathies may be with the feminist critics of Kristof and WuDunn (Moghadam, 2010; Narayan, 2010; Shachar, 2010), the critical grounded normative political theory of rights-based responsibility invites me to be self-critical and to invest in building capacities and linkages that reveal these complexities and offer them as clarifying depth. Our criticism of them for ignoring many of the important economic and political forces is responsible if we approach it in a rights-based way of building alliances even with those we criticize. Despite profound disagreement, our goals are able to be aligned in many respects. Rights-based responsibility focuses on the possibilities for intersectional analysis, cross-issue awareness, capacity-building, networking, and learning. While a girl rising is an image of solitary vulnerability, girls rising and taking responsibility for human rights is an image of power and cultural transformation, of politics, not magic.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Brooke Ackerly’s research interests include democratic theory, feminist methodologies, human rights, and social and environmental justice. She integrates into her theoretical work empirical research on activism. Her publications include Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge 2000), Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge 2008), and Doing Feminist Research with Jacqui True (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). She is currently working on the intersection of global economic, environmental, and gender justice and completing a book on the rights-based approach to responsibility.

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