Uprooting the curious grapevine

The transformative potential of actor-center perspectives and localization in the field of human rights

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the top-down nature of human rights norm-setting is increasingly being challenged, both

by practitioners and by scholars who propose a range of methodologies and approaches to draw

attention to the daily realities of human rights users and to the ways in which human rights are received

by these rights-holders. Actor-centered perspectives, and localization perspectives in specific, have

lamented the persisting challenge in upstreaming the voices of rights-holders and have been attempting

to place rights-holders at the center of the analysis. This paper raises three concerns regarding the basic

assumptions of these perspectives. Firstly, this literature often presented ‘the particular’ as an attribute

of the local, and ‘the universal’ as an attribute of the international human rights and development

architecture, thus ignoring the many instances in which local struggles were fully in line with the

universal discourse. Secondly, much of this literature has proposed the metaphor of a network to

describe the structure of international human rights law, but, in doing so, had a blind eye for systematic

factors and power relations that continue to play an important role in structuring rights-holders potential

to engage in the development of new international human rights. This risks swinging the agency-

structure pendulum too far in the direction of agents, to the extent of depoliticizing the discourse

development and human rights. Thirdly, these perspectives have paid insufficient attention to the

development of a theory of change that specifies the causal mechanisms that can explain how human

rights users stand to benefit from the localization of human rights. To support these critiques, the paper

systematically refers to the field of development, where similar concerns with grassroots participation

and bottom-up processes have been around for more than two decades. The paper argues in favor of

more attention to the conceptualization of these issues in order to render localization perspectives more

– theoretically and practically – potent.

Key words: localization, bottom-up processes, human rights norm-setting, users, local, development

Introduction

Human rights are probably the dominant conception in the contemporary globalized world.

Development is no exception to this, and - after years of having lived in splendid isolation -

development interventions have increasingly been framed in the language of human rights since the late

1980s-early 1990s (Gauri and Gloppen, 2012: 485; Sano, 2007; Molyneux and Lazar, 2003). Today both

the 'powerpoint presenters and the dirty-fingernails folk' converge around the acceptance that human

rights ought to play some role in development, and that human rights and development are two

concepts that are mutually reinforcing (Uvin, 2007: 597).

Nyamu-Musembi (2004) identified several contextual factors that have fostered this rapprochement

between human rights and development, amongst others the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to

Development; the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights which raised the profile of human rights

approaches; the end of the Cold War which allowed for a more comprehensive view of development

encompassing both economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political rights; and the more

general shift in development cooperation from project-based interventions and structural adjustment

programs towards budget support for governments, which required good governance and accountability

on the side of these governments. Gauri and Gloppen (2012) add that a human rights-based approach to

development was also favored by countries in the global South because it presented the fight against

poverty as a moral imperative and added legitimacy to these countries' request for a redistribution of

resources. Moreover, rights were seen as a means for reframing participation, more specifically

participation in the form of mobilization of citizens to claims their own rights, rather than depending on

external needs-assessments.

The idea behind the rights-based approach to development (HRBAD) is that impoverishment and

disempowerment are two sides of the same coin, and that development interventions should lead to

the empowerment of socially and economically disadvantaged groups (Ghai, 2001). The African

Commission on Human and People’s Rights for example recently held that the UN Declaration on the

right to development requires that the result of development should be the empowerment of a local

community; a community’s capabilities and choices must improve in order for the right to development

to be realized (African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 1990: XXV). While the HRBAD is

understood in different manners, it is normally distilled to a few core principles: participation,

accountability, non-discrimination, empowerment, and human rights normativity (Vandenhole and

Gready, 2014: 294).

Soon after the rhetorical victory of the approach, questions had to be asked about the exact relation

between human rights and development however. While human rights and development are certainly

related, each has a different internal logic. Nevertheless, to date, both scholars and practitioners have

failed to clarify how the proposed structural change that is implicit in a HRBAD is to be achieved (Gready

and Ensor, 2005). Also other questions have remained unanswered. Is there evidence for the alleged

complementarity between the HRBAD and other development paradigms? How to deal with

politicization? And, most importantly, what is the ultimate goal of the HRBA? As Vandenhole and

Gready (2014: 294) put it, “How structural change might be achieved requires much greater clarification,

both conceptually and practically. As a minimum, underlying implicit assumptions of change need to be

rendered explicit [...] ideally a theory rather than assumptions of change underpin HRBADs”. The same

consideration should be made for the perspective of localizing human rights.

One of the effects of a HRBADs - and especially of their stress on participation and empowerment of

rights-holders - has been the move away from holistic theorizations about development towards more

localized, empirical and inductive approaches that introduce a new starting point (local struggles rather

than international norms), a new prioritization (processes rather than outcomes) and a new end goal

(changes in power relation rather than the implementation of existing ideas). There has thus been a

growing concern with, and promotion of, participation/consultation of rights-holders and localization of

interventions in the field of development.

Recently also human rights scholars and practitioners started to take this concern that had become

dominant in the field of development seriously, and the number of publications on the

contextualization, vernacularization, localization and upstreaming of human rights has grown steadily in

the last decade (see, for example, Levitt and Merry, 2009; 2011; Desmet, 2014; Ore Aguilar, 2011). Like

development actors, human rights actors are increasingly looking to civil society, participation and

ordinary people to develop a vision for the new era. The idea is that, if HRBADs are taken seriously, their

principles should also be applied to the very core of the approach, namely the international human

rights framework itself, and that the principles of participation and empowerment should also extend to

this realm.

In this article I explore some of the underlying assumptions of this evolution towards more actor-

centered approaches of human rights which promote bottom-up processes. While acknowledging and

applauding the significant work that these approaches have done in visibilizing rights-users and their

contextual realities, I problematize some of the underlying assumptions and potential unintended

consequences. After a discussion of the different strands of actor-centered approaches, I identify three

specific dilemmas of these approaches, firstly, their tendency to identify 'the local' and 'the global' as

empirically distinct categories, and their consequent inclination to pay disproportionate attention to

differences between these allegedly distinct realms; secondly, the under the blind eye for structural

impediments to localization; and, thirdly, the persistent vagueness regarding the way in which change is

to emerge and how users of human rights stand to benefit from this.

Actor-centered perspectives

After gaining importance in the field of development, actor-centered perspectives are also becoming

increasingly important in the field of human rights. In this paper, actor-centered perspectives refer to an

understandings of human rights that is informed by the concrete experiences of the particular actors

involved in, and who stand to gain directly from, the struggles in question (see Nyamu-Musembi, 2002:

1). These perspectives aim to shift the parameters of the discourse and expand the possibilities for

action by shedding new light on some key debates that have long existed among human rights

practitioners and scholars, such as the tension between universalists and cultural relativists. By

acknowledging that rights are shaped through the actual struggles informed by people's understanding

of to what they are justly entitled and by examining the meaning of rights from the perspective of those

claiming them, the defined normative parameters of the human rights debate are transformed and the

range of claims that are validated as rights claims is expanded (Nyamu-Musembi, 2002).

These perspectives are based in legal literature that calls for an evaluation of legal principles in terms of

their concrete effects in social settings rather than in terms of the conceptual coherence of abstract

principles. They can be read as a critique to legal doctrinalism that promotes a singular legal point of

view rather than acknowledging the plurality of experiences (Cotterrell, 2005), and as a call for more

interdisciplinarity in the legal realm; an attempt, in other words, to address societal problems within

their wider societal context and to look for solutions by borrowing from other fields (Vick, 2004: 181).

The growing importance of the field of cultural studies and legal anthropology pushed legal scholars,

including human rights scholars, to acknowledge that law may manifest itself in different forms and that

individuals and groups can interact with the law in a diversity of ways (Baumgaertel et al, 2014). This

legal pluralism posits that openness and normative incompleteness are not problematic for the practice

of human rights, precisely because the legitimacy of human rights does not depend on assumptions or

aspirations of universality (Goodale, 2007: 26).1 Actor-entered approaches have a normative component

(putting people at the heart of human rights discourse and practice) and a pragmatic component

(fostering greater legitimacy and efficiency of human rights law), as well as an ethical component

(talking about the duties of human rights actors) (Delmas-Marty 2006).

This normative component in particular inspired localization scholars, actor-centered scholars who are

concerned with the actual empowering potential of human rights, and who argue that human rights can

only become a resource for advocacy once rights-holders perceive them as such (Keck and Sikkink,

1998). For grassroots activists to consider international human rights norms as a resources in their

concrete struggles, these norms need to adequately reflect the daily realities of rights-holders. This

process of localization has been conceptualized in various ways, either by focusing on the translation of

existing norms by framing them in culturally relevant manners, or by underlining the need for these

international norms to become more reflective of local realities, or through a combination of both. Each

of these strands of localization is discussed in turn below.

The vernacularization of human rights

“The question on the nature of human rights, must to some extent, ultimately depend on the time,

place, institutional setting and other peculiar circumstances of each society”

(Ibhawoh, 2004: 28)

"The idea of human rights is perhaps most consequentially shaped and conceptualized outside the

centers of elite discourse, even if what can be understood as the organic philosophy of human rights is

often mistakenly described as 'practice (i.e., in false opposition to theory)"

(Goodale, 2007: 25)

Scholars studying the vernacularization of human rights ask how transnational ideas, such as human

rights norms, become meaningful in local social settings and how they move across the gap between

1 Universalism is defined here as a social practice, in opposition to the putative universality of human rights, even if

universalists gesture to the universality of human rights, these two notions are not necessarily ontologically

connected to each other (Goodale, 2007).

cosmopolitan awareness of human rights norms and local sociocultural understandings of the content of

these norms. They thus explore how these norms travel from the transnational realm to the local

community, and how they are being used in different contexts (see, for example, Levitt and Merry,

2009). This process whereby human rights norms are extracted from the universal and adapted to local

institutions and meanings, is often referred to as vernacularization (Levitt and Merry, 2009; Levitt and

Merry 2011).2 Their interest is in how ordinary people make sense of all these messages and how global

ideas are translated to, and appropriated in, local contexts (Merry, 2006a; Merry, 2006b). The rationale

for focusing on these issues is that human rights are more easily adopted if they are packaged in familiar

terms, and that local practices can contribute to achieving universal protection of human rights and to

the realization of human dignity more broadly.

For these local practices and universal discourses to align, a process of framing is required, in which local

leaders propose a discourse to make an 'imported' idea persuasive to the extent of inspiring collective

action. To be effective, these frames need to be resonant with existing cultural traditions - which does

not necessarily imply that they are less radical (Marx Ferree 2003).3 The importance of balancing the

need for resonance and radicalism however, places the norm-entrepreneurs - often community leaders,

national elites or middle levels social activists - at the center of the analysis. Merry (2006b) describes

how norm- entrepreneurs weave practices and discourses from the locality and from outside to produce

a hybrid discourse on human rights, and stresses that this engagement with a human rights discourse

adds to activists' understanding of a certain problem, rather than displacing existing analyses. She

argues that activists might adopt these perspectives because they feel it will help them frame a problem

differently and deal with it in a more effective manner, of because they identify with the idea of global

connectedness.

This focus on how norms are translated from the global arena down challenges the idea that human

rights law should seek to set universal standards using legal rationality and foregrounds the particulars

of the local context instead (Merry 2006b). By arguing that human rights spread more effectively and

with greater legitimacy if they are adapted to local cultural contexts and systems of law, this perspective

takes the middle between universalists (who argue that human rights are powerful because of their

universality and should therefore be adopted in all contexts, despite differences in local normative

2 The process is also sometimes referred to as indigenization, which also stresses the potential shifts in meaning

that happens when ideas are presented in terms of existing cultural norms, values and practices. 3 Note that frames are not ideas in themselves, but rather ways of packaging existing ideas.

systems) and cultural relativists (who argue that human rights should not be imposed in societies with

different normative value systems) (Also see An Na’im 1992).

Upstreaming of local voices

Whereas vernacularization literature is concerned with the local appropriation of existing transnational

norms, the literature on upstreaming deals with the opposite dynamic and proposes to make human

rights norms more locally relevant by ensuring that these transnational norms become more reflective

of local realities. This approach is heavily inspired by the concern with bottom-up approaches that has

characterized the field and study of development in recent decades.

The argument is that communities that go through a human rights crisis build up knowledge - a usage of

human rights linked to their living conditions - that should be recorded and transmitted (whether their

struggle was successful or not) if human rights want to develop into a global protection tool (De Feyter,

2006; De Feyter 2007). Bales argues that, in order to provide effective protection in cases of crisis or

violation, human right norms must change if and when the situation to which they refer changes. For

this reality to be known to norm-setters, more interaction with those suffering violations on the ground

is required.

There is thus not only a normative concern with giving voice and visibility to local rights-holders, but also

an efficacy argument for more attention to bottom-up norm-setting. Merry (1988), adds an ontological

consideration to this when arguing that law is, a priori, a set of cultural principles and categories

crystalized into legal concepts, and that, as such, law is local knowledge.

The argument that human rights can only be truly universal if they build on as many cultures as possible,

rather than working from a Western conception of rights as a starting point is a logical next step (Mutua,

2001). Gómez Isa (2014) proposes a more significant representation of different views on human rights

in transnational forums, and calls for a dialogue which challenges the Western authorship of vast shares

of the current human rights architecture. Vandenhole (2012) refers to this process reverse standard-

setting, and underlines the importance of ensuring that further norm-development - both substantive

and procedural - at the transnational level is rooted in realities on the ground. One of the first scholars

to promote this idea was Stammers (1999) who argued that, in this process too, social movements -

because of their potential to make power visible - have an important role to play in reconstructing ideas

and practices of human rights (also see Falk 2000). The idea that existing human rights standards should

be open to revision and reformulation (An-Na’im, 1992), is shared by a third strand of localization

literature.

Bi-directionality

This strand of literature too resonates with the broader trend of proposing alternative models to

globalization by consciously and systematically favoring the local over the global (Oré Aguilar, 2011). As

De Feyter (2011) argues "If one is to learn from the local practice of human rights, with a view of

increasing their social relevance, what counts as a local human rights claim should not be limited to a

claim based in existing international human rights law." This strand of literatures shares with both other

perspectives the idea that there is a need to decenter human rights law and to perceive of social

practice as contributing to the idea of human rights, as well as the idea that diversity of discourses

within the overarching human rights discourse reinforces rather than diminishes the effectiveness of

human rights (Goodale, 2007; De Feyter, 2011).

It argues that a local infusion into global human rights can be achieved in two ways, first by seeking

locally relevant interpretations of abstract treaty norms in order to benefit from the opportunities that

international human rights law already offers, and second, by developing global human rights law and

practice further in the directions that will make it more reflective of local rights-holders concerns (De

Feyter, 2011). This implies that, in order to achieve adequate protection, these scholars propose efforts

on two fronts: within societies efforts must be undertaken towards cultural, political and ideological

change so as to make these societies more receptive to human rights. At the same time, within the

international human rights system, there is need for more receptiveness to accommodate some of these

societies' particularistic claims (Brems , 2001: 338, 511).4

This perspective has been applied to the Inter-American Court of Human rights, where it has been

shown how indigenous peoples from Colombia have indeed appropriated the existing rights discourse,

turned it into a useful tool for defending their claims and later sought to enrich this discourse with new

4 Brems (2001) specifies that there is no room for relativism in case of gross human rights violations that attack

the core of human rights, and that the idea of inclusivity accommodates variation as long as this does not

undermine the essence of the human rights norms.

proposals and ideas based on their own worldviews via the Colombian Constitutional Court and the

Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Gómez Isa, 2014).

This perspective is also the most methodologically developed strand of localization literature discussed

here. In "The local relevance of human rights: a methodological approach", Oré Aguilar (2011) offers a

highly detailed methodology for analyzing each step of the process through which local human rights

struggles can become part of the transnational human rights architecture. The question that this

methodologically sound chapter - as well as other publication mentioned on this matter - leaves

unaddressed however is that of how this process will benefit rights-holders in practice. The theoretically

and normatively appealing idea that a bidirectional localization of human rights render human rights

more legitimate and will facilitate that local communities will benefit from this, raises the question

about adequate protection mechanisms and access. Also the question of accountability remains

unaddressed in these publications, which raises the question if we do not risk to foster the kind of

rhetorical commitment to 'legitimacy without accountability' that currently also characterizes the field

of development (Chandler, 2002: 69). Does the increased concern with localization in the field of human

rights risk to become a replica of the pragmatic concern with localization that came to characterize the

field of development in the last two decades, or is this a genuinely new approach to human rights that

stands to definitely tip the balance in favor of more protection for rights-holders? In order to explore

this question, we critically examine three components of these perspectives in more detail.

Assessing the added value and pitfalls of localization in the field of human rights

The actor-centered perspectives discussed above, and their concern with decentering transnational

human rights norms in order to render them more locally relevant, have certain assumptions in

common. Most importantly, they are grounded in the idea that human rights allow for plurality, and that

there is no contradiction in maintaining human rights as a global language while at the same time

allowing variations to better reflect the reality of local rights-holders. They all claim that local relevance

of the human rights discourse is crucial to the legitimacy of human rights, and that human rights stand

to be enriched if they take into account input from different societies. (De Feyter, 2007; also see Mutua,

2001). Despite a - legitimate - concern with the visibilization and empowerment of rights-holders

however, there is also need for the problematization of some implicit assumptions of these

perspectives, and as scholars in the field of development have shown in the past 'localization',

'participation', 'stakeholder-involvement' and the like, are ideologies, which might, in the long run

backfire (see Uvin, 2007 for a discussion). We therefore explore three components of these perspectives

in more detail below.

Chalk and cheese - Talking about two empirically different phenomena?

Global/local social theoretical literature is voluminous with endless debates revolving around how these

levels relate to each other in terms of, for example, power or ontological priority (For an overview, see

Goodale, 2007). What the localization perspectives above have in common is an underlying assumption

of substantive and formal difference between the global and the local. Virtually all scholars of human

rights would acknowledge the existence of differences with regard to how human rights are received in

practice, and many would agree that any reference to what could even purportedly be a common

foundation of human rights would reduce that difference (Perrin, 2005). However, focusing too narrowly

on difference, can becloud the similarities which exist between struggles that might seem conceptually

different at first sight. While it is true that differences - of various kinds - are real and have real

consequences, the more important question is what these differences consist of and what their

significance is

Difference may indeed be rampant when talking about how different rights-users and communities of

rights-holders engage with international human rights norms - in the sense that there may be no trans-

cultural values since values only exist within a certain cultural context - but this is not the point here

(Coomans et al). The question is whether the difference between the local and the global level is indeed

the most significant one. Martinez (2012) argued that the reason why amplifying voices of local rights-

holders has been a persistent challenges, lies not so much in the fact that rights-holders conceive of

rights and dignity in terms or contexts that are locally particular and alien to the universal human rights

norms, but rather in the narrow issue framing which characterizes the transnational human rights

discourse. According to this author, the problem does not lie in a conceptual mismatch or in a linguistic

untranslatability of concepts, but in the flattening of the broad aims of local advocates’ agenda when

their issues are molded into the narrow issue framing favored in transnational law-based monitoring

and evaluation, which favors single-issue/perpetrator analysis over intersectional analysis (Martinez,

2012). Localization scholars – in their attempt to make human rights norms more locally relevant - focus

so strongly on the discourses and practices of certain groups and actors that they tend to overlook that

discourse may differ, but that underlying issues often do not, and that that what is really at stake to

make human rights locally relevant is the access that rights-holders have to the human rights power

houses to have their voices heard in an authentic manner under conditions of narrow issue framing.

There is thus not so much incompatibility between local and global concepts but, rather, a problem of

dis-embedding and re-embedding ideas in and from different contexts (Martinez, 2012).

Through a strategy of narrow issue framing - referred to as lawfare by Comaroff and Comaroff (2006) -

the transnational human rights system presents itself as unique and, in many ways, as the only, or at

least most desirable way to protect and realize human dignity. Goodale (2007), referring to Foucault's

argument about the partiality of language and the violence this does to things, suggests that human

rights, at least as seen through the eyes of universalists, have been implicated in this totalization by

excluding the singularity of the other, which is in many ways associated with modernity. He argues that,

“In each case, the problem itself is not, primarily, in the way ideas are put into practice, or in the social

or cultural contexts within which ideas emerge, important as these obviously are; rather, the problem is

embedded in the abstracted spheres in which competing accounts of concepts clash”. (Goodale, 2009:

48). The alleged fundamental difference between 'the global' an 'the local' then seems to lie above all in

the political and institutional context, rather than in cultural or conceptual content existing in different

realms. The human rights discourse however, presents itself as the only, or at least the most desirable,

strategy for addressing human dignity. This tendency to present the existing paradigm as the only viable

alternative is common feature of dominant ideologies.

Increasingly, critical scholars are asking however if we really need human rights to realize and protect

human dignity (See, for example, Coomans et al, 2009: 77). One argument is that many actors are

currently 'doing' human rights and are waging a conceptually similar struggle, without calling it that.

However, as Coomans et al (2009) argue, asking whether another culture also has the notion of human

rights might be the wrong starting point, because it assumes that human rights are the only way to

protect human dignity. Following this logic, the goal should not be to transliterate human rights into

other cultural languages or to look for analogies. Instead, we should try to find the homeomorphic

equivalent of human rights. If human rights are considered in one culture to be the basis for the exercise

of and respect for human dignity, we must look what satisfies the equivalent need in another society -

which may look different, but might be conceptually analogous.

Issues of human dignity can in theory perfectly be addressed in a different language than the language

of human rights, and there are, in fact, certain disadvantages to the dominance of the human rights

paradigm (such as a tendency to overemphasize self-interest and to underestimate the role of relations

with others for human dignity). Even if significant progress has been made in mobilizing the

international community for the issue of human dignity through the instrument of human rights, the

human rights discourse is only one possible way in which a particular culture envisages a just human

order. Others may use other frameworks or discourses, but the content is likely to be similar (Coomans

et al, 2009).

However, the assumption of a fundamental difference between the discourse of human rights and the

concrete actions of rights-holders, and users of human rights more broadly,5 often lead to the

interpretation that the adoption of a human rights-based strategy as the most desirable option to arrive

at social change.6 Implicit here is an assumption of linearity, whereby the concrete actions of people

eventually lead to human rights action, and thus also an assumption about a human rights-based

strategy being, almost inherently, the most desirable outcome. This belief in the inherent added value of

adopting a human rights-based strategies is, de facto, also what inspires all three perspectives discussed

above to conceptualize ways in which users can engage in the translation and vernacularization of

human rights, and how they can contribute to this decidedly important framework.7

Another implication of this focus on differences and tensions between the local and the global level is

that this may also inspire a presumption of fundamental sameness within these different levels. While

their engagement with concrete realities of rights-holders is aimed precisely at visibilizing the myriad of

ways in which people interact with transnational human rights norms, localizations scholars - across the

board - at times fall in the trap of downplaying diversity, differences in voice and access, and existing

power relations at the local level.8 Several scholars of localization have been particularly adept in

describing the various realities of rights-holders in empirically rich and analytically sound ways (see, for

example, Levitt and Merry, 2009; 2011; Vandenbogaerde; 2015; Chen et al, forthcoming; Gómez Isa,

2014). However, despite their attention for the concrete and diverse realities of rights-holders, what

5 On the notion of 'users', see Desmet, 2014. 6 7 Consider the very choice of calling this process vernacularization, in reference the vernacularization of the Latin

bible, the undisputed touch-stone for morality and for the good and pious life in that days and age.

8 This diversity - and exclusion - at the local level, also raises the question of representativity. Who is allowed to speak for 'the local' in interactions with the transnational human rights norms setters?

these studies have in common, is that they tend to lock rights-holders up in the category of local, which

then comes to be defined, in a most general sense, as 'particularistic' - as opposed to the transnational

realm, which is commonly seen as more universaliatic. As Merry (2006b: 3) argues, “The division

between transnational elites and local actors is based less on culture or tradition than on tensions

between a transnational community that envisions a unified modernity and national and local actors for

whom particular histories and contexts are important”. The question then rises if the particular is indeed

a special attribute of the perspectives of local users of human rights, and the universal a special

attribute of the outlooks of international human rights advocates.

Martinez (2012) rejects this juxtaposition of 'the particular' and 'the universal', and their implicit

ascription to 'the local' and 'the global' realm respectively. He argues that across the board, we witness a

combination of parochial and universalizing understandings. This objection is, partially, inspired by the

fact that the very identification of two distinct realms, sets these two realms analytically apart, and

treats them as if they were observable empirical realities, thus locking rights-holders into this - motley

but isolated - category. Next to the conceptual isolation of the local which is created in this way,

localization perspectives also assume a certain problematic linearity: If 'the local' successfully engages

with the transnational human rights framework, it could - to some extent - also become part of 'the

global'. Yet, as I will argue below, these perspectives do not pay sufficient attention to the mechanisms

that would allow 'the local' to move from the periphery to the center, or from the bottom-up to the top,

thus rhetorically distancing it further. I take issue with this treatment of 'local' and 'global' as two

discrete entities that could somehow be operationalized as existing separate from each other, with only

the existence of certain top-down and bottom-up mechanisms keeping them together. This

presentation rests on the mental image of an empirical binary in which only two levels matter. Also

Goodale (2007: 14) challenges this anthropomorphization of spatial-theoretical categories that do not

exist in their own right, but only through their invocation by scholars, who tend to present the political

goal, moral ideal or theoretical possibility of, for example, global justice, as an empirical reality rather

than for what it really is.

In his critique however, Goodale stays markedly close to the model that he seeks to revisit. By invoking

the notion of inbetweenness, he seeks to shed light on all the different realms that exist between these

two extremes of the continuum which local and global are. This argument thereby does not

reconceptualize the idea that the local and the global are indeed two opposite ends of a continuum, and

that the core questions is about how these two distinct levels can interact. The linear and vertical

metaphor of local-global thus remains intact in this model. The analysis of localization proposed by Oré

Aguilar (2011) is more original in its discussion of how the global and local relate to one another, in the

sense that it proposes a bi-directional circular model. However, this model too is problematic in the

sense that it is consistently referred to as a network, while explicitly being structured as a chain of users

which is not multi-nodal (Oré Aguilar, 2011; De Feyter, 2011). Moreover, while Oré Aguilar herself states

that power depends on actors' varying degrees of access to information and decision making, neither

power nor access are explicitly integrated in this model as explanatory factors (see infra). This is

particularly problematic precisely because people in the 'class' of 'the local' often have fewer access.9

A more genuinely networked analysis then seems to offer a solution to this problem of juxtaposing local

and global is if they were two empirically distinct and conceptually diverse spheres. However, also in a

genuinely networked analyses there the risk exists that the consideration of power as a variable shaping

the transnationalization of human rights discourse becomes obscured by an ideological faith in the

alleged democratizing potential of networks. Power should be fully and explicitly conceptualized

however, especially because it does not merely exist within networks, but can also be mobilized through

these networks (Goodale, 2007: 23 - own emphasis). Ignoring this and proposing a model that presents

networks as flat and equalizing structures, places the most disenfrachised users and their struggles at

risk of further invisibilization.

In sum, the global-local framework is often adopted as internally contradictory or at best analytically

confusing model. While the binary – in spite of being a largely imaginary one – remains important to

emphasize power asymmetries that have characterized the transnationalization of human rights in the

last two decades (Goodale, 2007). However, despite its potential added value in describing an existing

empirical reality, this binary does not serve the transformative goal which localization theorists set

themselves, in the sense that it does not offer users of human rights a way out of the category of local

for failing to rigorously conceptualize access, power relations or mechanisms of causality. There is thus a

problematic assumption of equality in the current use of the global-local lexicon (in which there is

insufficient attention for the many ways in which users do not have equal access to human rights norm

setting). At he same time, this assumption of equality with regards to access and power coexists with an

9 This links back to the above discussion about the way in which the notion of local is used in most of these perspectives, and which intersects greatly with historicity, class, (non-)cosmopolitanism, power, access, exposure, resources. As Amita Punj posits, the global economic space is not a unified marketplace, it is a highly hierarchical space in which the core is opposed to the periphery because of the unequal terms of the trade. The notion of the local often refers to this periphery described by Punj, rather than to a geographical unit.

implicit assumption of inequality whereby concrete struggles by users are not seen as equals to the

human rights framework which continues to hold normative high ground. This discussion links to a

second potential shortcoming of localization perspectives.

Further depoliticizing the - largely depoliticized - struggle?

Oré Aguilar (2007) explicitly states that the focus on the localization of human rights is not intended to

obscure extant power structures and inequalities within a given community, and acknowledge that local

communal structures are not necessarily horizontal and/or democratic, meaning that those groups that

are at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid suffer differently and still have no access. Despite

a rhetorical acknowledgement of this reality, the model that she consequently proposes does not

account for power relations within the different nodes of her model though (Vandenhole, 2012).

Formally the goal of the various localization perspectives is to examine how the interplay between

global and local can be achieved. To this end, these perspectives strongly engage with the concrete

realities of human rights users in order to visibilize the myriad of ways in which people interact with

transnational human rights norms. However, because of this almost exclusive focus on what users do in

their particular situation, both the power relations amongst users of various kinds, as well as the power

relations between these users on the one hand and the dominant global human rights actors on the

other hand, tend to stay underspecified. Localizations scholars - across the board - at times fall into the

trap of downplaying differences and power relations - within and between nodes of the alleged network

- and of describing concrete actions in relative isolation of broader economic and political structures

that shape interactions. The overarching idea is that codifying local knowledge is a first step towards

beneficial social change, but this way of reconstructing and mapping knowledge related to concrete

abuses, privileges certain interpretations of local needs and often leaves untouched the wider

processes, dynamics, institutions and structures that created the need to formulate a human rights

claim. This, moreover, does not allow for a systematic exploration of how social actors often experience

the relations within this network vertically, as part of a hierarchical, social, political and legal alignment

of interests (see also Goodale, 2007: 20).

Thus, in seeking to put users and their concrete actions at the forefront of the analysis, these

perspectives have, inadvertently let structural problems unaddressed. This disengagement with the role

of structures and institutions can be explained by an disproportionate concern with anthropological

methods, but also, and maybe more importantly, by the fact that these perspectives are implicitly

pinned on a harmony model of power, which suggests that the empowerment of the powerless can

happen within the existing social order without negatively affecting the power of the powerful (Mohan

and Stokke, 2000).10

As a result, there is insufficient attention for how, and which, ideas can travel, and for what the human

rights powerhouses do if and when content reaches them. The literature on vernacularization for

example stresses the importance of norm-entrepreneurs for ensuring that synergies are created, but it

fails to specify through which mechanisms these norm-setters can have influence within the networks of

which they are part. This lack of attention for how networks function, suggests an inaccurate invocation

of the network metaphor. While these localization perspectives claim to offer a more empirically correct

description of how legal norms travel by considering the existence of networks, they often fail to go

beyond the rhetoric of networks and to consistently apply the vocabulary or logic that is inherent to

network analysis, when, for example, using the notion of network and chain interchangeably (De Feyter,

2011). De Feyter (2007: 83) also states that, “A bottom-up approach requires that the human rights

experiences of communities set the agenda for the entire network. Whether this will happen depends

upon the relationship between the actors in the network, which are ideally based on egalitarian

‘Habermas like’ discourse, resulting in a common understanding of human rights and of the strategy to

be pursued. In reality, resources may be divided unequally among the actors, and a top-down hierarchy

may set in, unless power balances are negotiated very carefully’. This does not specify how power

relations can be negotiated if actors initially have unequal access and resources to start with.

Calling human rights law a network, but proposing a chain model in which each actor is highly

dependent on the previous link in the chain for access to other actions, moreover ignores how power

relations shape the access of users in this chain, and pays insufficient attention to how structural and

systemic features of the process shape - and usually limit - the emancipatory potential of networks.

Bailleux (2014: 5) argues that networks are fluid (the “antithèse de la frontière”) and do not have fixed

boundaries. He emphasizes their poly-centric and interdependent nature, and the absence of a

unilateral top-down logic when stating that, “the network metaphor captures this dialectical movement

through which law develops. Networks have no fixed borders, no assigned center, no pre-established

organization or shape. They operate and thrive through the spontaneous and disorderly interactions of

their nodes”. His assumption of openness ignores that, obviously, some networks and mechanisms have

10 Compare this with, for example, post-Marxism that conceptualizes power in relational and conflictual terms.

more status than others, as well as the fact that the alleged horizontality that describes the relations

between different nodes of the network cannot account for the ways in which social actors often

experience the relations within this network vertically, as part of a hierarchical, social, political and legal

alignment of interests (See also Goodale, 2007: 20).

Thus rather than describing the discrepancy between the rhetoric these actors use and the logic they

describe to nonchalance, it is more likely that the assumption of networks is simply not representative

of reality in the sense that hierarchies that are ruled by access to power continue to dominate the field

in practice, and that any model that ignores the way in which power plays out is bound to be inaccurate

and will have to deal with internal contradictions. That such a network analysis is aspirational rather

than empirical is illustrated by Vandenbogaerde (2015), who analyses the difficulty rights-holders have

to put points on the agenda of the human rights council (Also see Gray 2005).

The above raises the questions about parallels between the field of development and that of human

rights. In the field of development, the last two decades have been characterized by a strong concern

with bottom-up approaches and grassroots participation. Participation was originally conceived of as

part of the counter-hegemonic approach to radical social transformation, intended to challenge the

status quo (Leal, 2007). Paradoxically, the notion gained so much legitimacy in the field of development

in the 1980s and 1990s that it also gained legitimacy within the existing institutions - thus challenging

the potential for sweeping change. As a consequence, the meaning of participation as an approach and

methodology that serves counter-hegemonic processes of grassroots resistance and transformation has

been lost, and the notion became one of the buzzwords in the field of development, one of the ways for

the development complex to reinvent itself (Leal, 2007: 539). Gradually, any drawback soon became

attributed to the top-down blueprint mechanisms, which should be replaced by more people-friendly,

bottom-up processes in order to be more efficient. Leal argues that “in the hands of the development

industry, the political ambiguity [of participation] has been functional to the preservation of the status

quo." The idea of participation was thus mainstreamed in all development interventions, but in such a

way that it - generated a sense of legitimacy and political correctness, without ever becoming more than

a convenient add-on that did not require structural changes.

Care should thus be taken that the current concern with bottom-up process and grassroots participation

in norm-setting that is becoming increasingly popular in the field of human rights does not evolve in the

same direction of, essentially, becoming a whitewashing to cover up a more fundamental inadequacy of

certain aspects of the human rights architecture. Such whitewashing would mean that a situation arises

whereby a declaration and treaties are considered legitimate when they are rooted in broad

participation of rights-holders, without necessarily talking to the substance of what is needed to protect

human dignity - by addressing the forces that produce and perpetuate inequality. In such a situation,

people buy into a process that does not benefit them if the way in which they are involved is not serving

their strategic interests (Molyneux and Lazar, 2003).

That this is a reasonable concern, is underlined by the fact that even a request for procedural

requirements - i.e. that the UN General Assembly would meet - whenever it was engaged in drafting

new human rights law - with governments, relevant international and regional organizations and non-

governmental organizations - was never followed-up (see Alston, 1984: 620). Even if such procedural

devices would have been an incomplete mechanism in any case, the refusal to adopt them can be seen

as proof of the extent to which there was never a commitment to genuine change. How then would the

assumption of horizontal networks be assumed to capture reality - even in a foreseeable future?

The concern with bottom-up processes and grassroots involvement could thus play out in the same way

in the field of human rights as in the field of development. In the field of development too, the initial

rationale was that local knowledge would reverse the previously damaging interpretations which

treated locals as passive recipients. However now the pendulum swung to the other side and individual

agents have become the key political site, meaning that all attention for political structures has

disappeared (Mohan and Stokke, 2000). The attempt to put actors at the forefront thus, inadvertently,

led to a depoliticization of development, and the same risk exists in the field of human rights, where all

consultation and participation of users might be in vain as long as states remain the core ratifiers and

protectors of human rights.

Towards a theory of change

In their article "Towards a theory of change", Vandenhole and Gready (2014) challenge the effectiveness

of human rights-based approaches to development by arguing that insufficient attention has been paid

to the causal mechanisms that are supposed to lead to change when a HRBAD is implemented. The

same critique can be made about the localization of human rights. While a normative concern with the

protection of rights-holders inspires all these perspectives, insufficient attention has been paid to the

conceptualization of change, both organizational and normative. Localization scholars share an

assumption of change, but the mechanisms that could lead to organizational change have not

sufficiently been specified because there is insufficient attention for the way in which networks

function. In addition, because of the lack of attention for how power operates in society at large, it is

also unclear how societal change would emerge, or even how the individual users stands to benefit from

localization in practices.

So far, most localization scholars have dealt with the conceptual questions raised by the idea of bottom-

up norm-setting. In order to go beyond this, more attention for how networks operate and for

mechanisms for facilitating exchanges is needed. How do local struggles reach the recommendations of

UN treaty bodies, the special procedures or the universal periodic review? How do UN Country Teams

deal with local rights holders? How to develop and strengthen specific mechanisms for meaningful

participation in norm-setting? How to foresee mechanisms that take into account that they have to

work in different contexts, and have to be operated by practitioners with different disciplinary

backgrounds and training?

De Feyter (2007) attempts to answer these questions when discussing participation of users. He argues

that 1) community-based organizations (i.e. organizations that are managed by members of the

community on behalf of members of the community) should be the starting point. These organizations

reach out to 2) NGO's, often in the capital, with more expertise and with a capacity of assisting the

community-based organization in identifying the human rights angle of their struggle, and - ideally - with

working relations with 3) an international human rights NGO that can act across national borders when

the domestic space is limited and that is part of 4) a transnational activist network (See also Keck and

Sikkink, 1998). The model does not, however, answer the question of how representative the

community-based organization is, and which type of community-based organizations are more likely to

have access, not does it elaborate on the agenda-setting power of the last three actors in the chain. As

Eyben puts it “donors gang up on recipients to drive through their agendas”, forming “cartels” with

whom it may be imprudent to argue. These ‘partnerships’ she argues are too focused on achieving

noiseless consensus to actually allow for an exchange of ideas. Also Levitt and Merry (2009) argue that

social relations and networks strongly influence the path and impact of cultural circulation and that the

social position of the messenger is key. Centrally placed elite actors are better placed than others.

Whether an idea spread and leads to change, tends to depend on where an actor sits in the social and

power hierarchy, and some networks and mechanisms have more status than others. Hannertz

describes this as the 'unfree flows of meaning' that continue to exist despite the increasingly networked

structure of social life and legal domain (1992: 100).

Thus, despite its value for empirical analysis, this model too does therefore not offer a sufficient tool to

assess the mechanisms that could lead to organizational change - especially because of the inaccurate

assumption of a horizontal network which underlies it. Even if it were though, the question remains,

how such organizational change would lead to societal change. Historically, institutional development

has not led to social transformation (Leal, 2007: 541). Moreover, focusing too strongly on the

mechanisms for organizational change, could have the dangerous side-effect of presenting the question

of social change as technical or technocratic matter, rather than as a political one.

Overall, these perspectives suffer from the fact that they do not only miss a sound theorization

regarding the exact mechanisms that could lead to organizational change, but also from the fact that

they leave untouched the wider process that creates local human rights problems, and can thus not

adequately identify the mechanisms that would lead to societal change. The overarching idea is that

codifying local knowledge is a first step towards beneficial social change. However, from this specific

construction of knowledge power relations are mostly absent, which is particularly problematic precisely

because deprived users of human rights are the most vulnerable ones and cannot easily negotiate their

place within the existing power structures themselves. The question of how to change the relationship

between “cultural insiders” and cultural outsiders, and amongst cultural outsiders, thus remains

unaddressed (See An-na’im 1994: 184).

Thus, while these perspectives have been instrumental in bringing users back to the forefront of

research on the impact of human rights, a genuine concern with the voices of users would require that

more attention is paid to the mechanisms that can lead to organizational and societal change, both in

terms of technicality and in terms of how power relations play out, and that we do not assume that it is

sufficient to posit our interest in the perspectives and realities of users.

Conclusion

In spite of the questions this paper has raised regarding some basic characteristics of actor-centered

approaches to human rights in general, and of localization literature in specific, this paper should not be

read as a plea for a return to a more universalistic way of assessing the impact of human rights. Few

people today would advocate a blind belief in universalism or would contest the need for a degree of

legal pluralism that allows for the acknowledgement of different voices. This paper too rejects the idea

that there is some inherent sameness beyond the mere fact of biology that supersedes all political,

religious or other differences that distinguish users of human rights from each other. Even if it is

significantly easier to rationally derive a framework – intellectual, political, legal or moral – that is based

on essential sameness than one that is based on essential difference, I do not challenge the acceptance

of a complicated - and sometimes - frustrating fact of a human multiplicity (See also Goodale, 2007: 59)

Therefore, I do not, by any means, dismiss the idea of localizing human rights, but instead, I invite for

more research on when and why it could work, and what it mean when we say that ‘it works’. Three

lacunae in this literature would need to be addressed to make this framework more empirically relevant

and analytically sound. Firstly, I raised a substantive-conceptual issue regarding the way in which the

very notion of ‘local’ and ‘global’ are used. While applauding the attention of actor-centered

perspectives to actual social practices, the article is at the same time an invitation for a more rigorous

conceptualization of the notion of ‘local’. The failure to do so would mean that these perspectives risk

adding to existing inequalities rather than offering actual avenues for challenging them. There is need

for more critical analysis of the uses of the term local but also a need to develop a political imaginary

that does not repeat the weaknesses of existing discourses, and that does not revolve around the

imaginary binary between local rights-holders on the one hand and the international human rights

system on the other hand. Secondly, I raised a politico-normative critique regarding the lack of

attention for power relations and structural forms of violence. The strong focus on the actual

experiences of users of human rights has swung the structure-agency pendulum decisively towards a

focus on agents, at the risk of overlooking structures. Actor-centered perspectives like localization put

the actors at the center of analysis, overlooking the importance of the structures within which these

actors operate. This is dangerous because it further shift the attention away from political responsibility

and from the need for structural reform. If structural reform is not conceptualized and implemented

voices of human rights users’ stand a very little chance of having an impact on the transnational human

rights architecture (see, for example, Vandenbogaerde, 2015). Also Martinez shows that political and

institutional contexts are more significant than conceptual incompatibilities in hampering an efficient

exchange between different actors. Ignoring this and focusing too strongly on issues of translation,

culture and concepts, also means ignoring the reality of structural exclusion. This paper should therefore

be read as an invitation for more anthropological sensitivities in the study of human rights impact,

without losing track of the deeply politicized nature of the endeavor. A third concerns raised in this

paper regards the theories of change underlying these perspectives, or rather the lack of a sound theory

on causal mechanisms of change, both at the organizational and the societal level. The goal of this paper

is to trigger a more explicit acknowledgement of the often implicit assumption of change in the

localization literature (Also see Vandenhole and Gready, 2014: 309). Expecting change – either

organizational or societal – through the mere foregrounding of the practices and priorities of human

rights users seems credulous. It assumes that bureaucrats and leaders are willing to carry out

transformative work, even in the absence of transformative structures, mechanisms or outside pressure.

The goal should not be to reform institutional human rights practice, but to transform society.

The paper therefore argues that despite significant merits, actor-centered perspectives and localization

perspectives need to be treated with caution. They might have a positive effect in the long term, but, at

present, too little is known about their impact to treat them as a deus ex machina. The proposal to

transform the human rights architecture by incorporating the voices of users can easily be co-opted in

the current global architecture, and we have to ask who the ultimate beneficiary of this localizing

exercise is, and how users stand to benefit from changes in the transnational human rights architecture

(also see Vandenhole and Gready, 2014). Care should therefore be taken that these perspectives are

not used as a rationale for creating yet more avenues for voice that do not ultimately translate into real

influence (Also see Nyamu-Musembi, 2004: 48). While it is true that it may be too early to expect studies

on the empirical impact of localization because of the relatively short time this perspective has been

around, comparisons with the field of development offer important warnings.

The rhetorical mainstreaming of bottom-up approaches and grassroots participation in the field of

development has been a clear example of how local participation can be used for different purposes by

different ideological stakeholders. This can underplay the role of the state and transnational power-

holders and can put responsibilities on rights-holders shoulders that may be too heavy. The question

then rises if it is desirable continue to promote a form of participation that can simply be added on to an

existing social project (be it neoliberal modernization, development or human rights) and that creates

an alibi for that project by – allegedly – transferring ownership in the name of empowerment. This

question is, of course, related to the broader consideration of whether participation should not be

rooted more firmly in radical politics of social transformation, and if its counterhegemonic roots should

not be re-affirmed in order to facilitate any kind of genuine societal transformation.

The emerging consensus over the influence that local voices should have – either in the field of

development or in the formulation of human rights – is thus not without dangers. Care should however

also be taken not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and not to discard a focus on actors and

their opinions in the least, but instead to re-articulate some of the core concepts and assumptions so

that the localization idea becomes more useful in, and representative of, the daily realities of rights-

holders.

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