Power, human rights and civic action

Over the last three decades, human rights as transnational ideals have inspired struggles for social justice and inclusive governance in diverse social contexts and political settings throughout the globe. Human rights have become mechanisms for framing public debates about legal and social justice and for assessing the functioning of private and public institutions, including the organization of politics, civil society projects and (increasingly) corporate behaviour. Partly based on the legitimacy that human rights have attained in global discourses, a human rights-based approach to global development has become increasingly popular and influential, notably since the mid-1990s. ¹ This volume has taken the rise of rights in development as its starting point and focused on the interaction between human rights-based approaches in development practices and the dynamics of power. It has been our contention that human rights-based approaches could become another failed development strategy without greater recognition of the political nature of struggles for human rights and how the realization of rights is often contested by powerful actors who oppose the progressive social change that human rights embody. One such powerful actor is the state, and the relationship between human rights and the state has always been paradoxical. On the one hand, human rights require the state to act in order to secure rights, while, on the other hand, human rights discourses also assume that human rights enforcement entails democratic control of the state, most typically by the empowerment of civil society organizations and civic action. Our exploration of power as a constraint on the securing of rights has gone beyond the state, however, and we have examined the role and impact of a range of powerful actors and forces, inclusive of the exertion of hidden and invisible power. Additionally, our analysis has not been determinate but dialectical in terms of structure and agency. Thus, while highlighting the obstacles to rights realization posed by extant structures and relations of power, we have also focused on the agency of human rights organizations in challenging social, economic and political power, and in building countervailing power that may help to transform power structures in ways that enhance the securing of human rights. We conceive of structures (and structural obstacles) as real but not ossified. Rather they are constructed, reconstructed and changed in continual processes of struggles (such as for human rights) between various actors and interest groups who themselves are endowed with differential powers through their structural position.