Human Rights and Transnational Culture: Regulating Gender Violence through Global Law

In the current era of human rights activism, the global production of human rights approaches to violence against women generates a wide variety of localization processes. Activists translate between global discourses and local contexts and meanings. Culture is conceptualized in quite different and sometimes contradictory ways in this process. Essentialized ideas of culture inhibit recognition of the potential contributions of local cultural practices and provide justifications for groups to resist these changes. This article shows, with reference to a case study of Fiji, that a more anthropological conception of culture provides a better picture of the localization process and foregrounds the role of activists who translate between global human rights ideas and local grievances

Research & Action Fall/Winter 2013

In this issue: Wellesley Centers for Women Connections grow in Washington, D.C. Recent Findings Fall/Winter 2013 Q&A with Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Ed.D.: Daughters of Educated Men: School Girls, College Women, and the Ethics of Settlement Life Q&A with Beatrice Achieng Nas, BSC: Nobody is a Nobody, Everybody is Somebody Commentary: Thinking about Trafficking by Sally Engle Merry, Ph.D. Spotlight: New Funding and Projects Fall/Winter 2013https://repository.wellesley.edu/researchandactionreport/1023/thumbnail.jp

Research & Action Report, Fall/Winter 2008

In this issue: Q & A with Sally Engle Merry Examining Mixed-Ancestry Identity in Adolescents Update on Work to Empower Children for Life Dual-Trauma Couples: Why Do We Need to Study Them? SEED Project Moves Educational Equity and Diversity Forwardhttps://repository.wellesley.edu/researchandactionreport/1013/thumbnail.jp

Feminist mobilisation for policy change on violence against women: insights from Asia

This article explores how women’s movements in China, India and Indonesia have mobilized to influence processes of legal reform on violence against women (VAW). Legal change is a complex and iterative process, in which both state and non-state actors negotiate and bargain over the content of law in the ‘policy space’, bringing different interests and needs to bear. The three countries featured here differ in many ways, including population size, political system (including varying levels and degrees of democratization and decentralization, and regional and local autonomy), and diversity in the population, including ethnicities and religions. A comparative study such as this offers important potential for understanding policy change on VAW, the role of women’s movements in this, and the obstacles to change

Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction

Constitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape. This article provides an introduction to this sort of study by contrasting constitutional ethnography with multivariate analysis and with nationalist constitutional analysis. The article advocates not a universal one-size-fits-all theory or an elegant model that abstracts away the distinctive, but instead outlines an approach that can identify a set of repertoires found in real cases. Learning the set of repertoires that constitutional ethnography reveals, one can see more deeply into particular cases. Constitutional ethnography has as its goal, then, not prediction but comprehension, not explained variation but thematization

The cultural politics of human rights and neoliberalism

Do human rights offer the potential to challenge neo-liberalism? I argue that rather than understanding human rights as ideology, as obscuring or legitimating neo-liberalism, it is more productive to see both human rights and neo-liberalism as hegemonic projects. In this article I explore convergences and divergences between dominant discourses and practices of human rights and neo-liberalism around key ideas ‘the state’, ‘the individual’ and ‘the nation’, to clear a space for appreciation of the cultural politics of human rights: divergences in constructions of responsibility and hierarchies of value of concrete individuals offer openings for challenging ideas and practices of neo-liberalism through campaigns for human rights