ABSTRACT
After the 1980 United Nations (UN) Conference on Women in Copenhagen, one feminist activist succinctly summarized a central dilemma that continues to shape the discourses and strategies of women’s human rights activists: “We need to mobilize outside the establishment, to create somehow an independent pool of resources to protect us from co-optation, or if we must be co-opted, to demand a much higher price for our cooperation” (Izraeli in McIntosh et al. 1981: 784). This dilemma is nothing new – feminist activists have always been concerned with the trade-offs of working inside and outside of institutions and structures that they seek to transform. However, this tension takes on specific forms in particular periods of time depending on the issue at hand, such as suffrage rights, reproductive rights, violence against women, and so on. In this chapter, I will explore this tension in the context of global
restructuring. Catherine Eschle (2004: 118) argues for feminist analyses which seek to understand “how other forms of power are constitutive of neoliberal economic developments,” and mainstream human rights, with its antecedents in liberalism, inalienability, and universality, constitute an axis of power in the ongoing reconfiguration of current political and economic systems. Eschle (2004: 118) notes that to analyze other “forms of power as globalized” in this way can reveal “ambiguities and contradictions,” and interrogating women’s human rights in the context of global restructuring does, indeed, reveal a significant contradiction. At the most basic level, feminist critiques of mainstream human rights (which have undergirded many feminist transnational networks) have been a form of resistance to neoliberal restructuring, but in another sense they have also been implicated
in and/or co-opted by the neoliberal project, which changes the nature of that resistance. My contextual starting point is the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference
on Women in Beijing and its resultant Platform for Action (BPA), since it is widely regarded as a critical juncture in the broadly (but not unproblematically) defined global women’s human rights movement.1 The BPA, though not without its critics, is often thought to be the penultimate achievement of feminist struggle and resistance. Indeed, Charlotte Bunch and Susana Fried (1996) argue that the BPA embodies the shift of women’s human rights from margin to center. In her reflections on this moment, Peggy Antrobus highlights the following:
The analytic framework that formed the basis for approaches to the women’s rights discourse was based on new understandings of the link between women’s social and economic rights and our civic and political rights, as well as how cultural relativism affects the full range of women’s human rights. This integration of the development paradigm with the rights paradigm can be seen as one of the achievements of the global women’s movement.
