Human rights and Nubian mobilisation in Egypt: towards recognition of indigeneity

How are global human rights localised in authoritarian societies? How and what human rights discourses are mobilised by indigenous peoples to further their demands? Building upon original fieldwork among Nubian activists in Egypt, this article explores the complexities regarding human rights framing through a discussion of recognition of Nubian indigeneity. The article finds that the history and political experience of Egypt’s Nubians bring about diverging opinions and also limitations as to how, and what, human rights frameworks rights claimants and their supporters are to employ. It argues that Egyptian nationalism not only affects how Nubian activists mobilise in general, but also helps explain the very limited appeals to a global discourse of human rights.     

Let's Argue about Migration: advancing a right(s) discourse via communicative opportunities

The emerging global governance of migration is dominated by two discourses which shape policy approaches: 1) migration management and 2) the migration–development nexus. With large numbers of labour migrants being marginalised, migrant rights organisations have formed global alliances to argue for the centrality of a third discourse, the rights-based approach to migration. The question is how to inject this into the global debate which has sidelined migrant rights issues. Despite having hardly any bargaining power and restricted space for direct access vis-à-vis global governing institutions, migrant rights organisations are employing a number of strategies to overcome this marginalisation. We analyse these efforts by drawing on social movement studies and International Relations research on communicative action. Empirically this article draws on observations made during two major global fora: the negotiations in connection with the new Convention on ‘Decent Work for Domestic Workers’ at the International Labour Conference (ilc) and civil society participation in the Global Forum on Migration and Development (gfmd).     

Private Water,Public Good: Water Privatization and State Capacity in Chile

In the global policy debate over whether water services in developing countries should remain public or be privatized, advocates for privatization call for reducing the role of the state in water services, while civil society groups argue that privatization violates the human right to water. This article examines water privatization in Chile, a crucial case in the debate over the role of markets and states in water services. Chile is known as a water privatization success story due to its high coverage of drinking water and sanitation under a fully privatized system. The article addresses two questions: How effectively does Chile meet the standard for fulfilling the human right to water within the privatized system? To what extent has privatization in Chile reduced the role of the state in water service provision? I find that the human right to water, narrowly defined, is fulfilled in Chile; however, this outcome is not attributable to the merits of privatization. Chile’s strong state capacity to govern the water sector in the public interest by embedding reforms in state interventions explains the relative success of the Chilean water sector. These findings support the argument that a strong state role is necessary to fulfill the human right to water, even in a privatized water sector.     

Language,nation and citizenship: contrast,conflict and convergence in Estonia's debate with the international community

This paper investigates the clash of (language) ideologies in Estonia in the post-Communist period. In an analysis of changing Western recommendations and Estonian responses during the transition of Estonia from Soviet Socialist Republic to independent state, we trace the development of the discourses on language and citizenship rights. Different conceptions of the nation-state and of how citizenship is acquired, together with different approaches to human rights, led to disagreement between Estonian political elites and the political actors attached to international institutions. In particular, the Soviet demographic legacy posed problems.

We use a context-sensitive approach that takes account of human agency, political intervention, power, and authority in the formation of (national) language ideologies and policies. We find that the complexities of cultural and contextual differences were often ignored and misunderstood by both parties and that in their exchanges the two sides appeared to subscribe to ideal philosophical positions. In the following two decades both sides repositioned themselves and appeared to accommodate to the opposing view. In deconstructing the role of political intervention pressing for social and political inclusion and in documenting the profound feeling of victimhood that remained as a legacy from the Soviet period and the bargain that was struck, we hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of the language ideological debates surrounding the post-Communist nation-(re)building process.     

How irresponsible are rising powers?

Rising powers like Brazil, China and India have recently made significant gains in their capabilities as states. Therefore many IR scholars are claiming that these powers must now contribute more to the provision of global public goods like a clean environment, free trade and human rights. This article will argue that reasonably democratic international political discourses are another global public good whose greater supply is sorely needed and that rising powers are having a positive impact on the creation of such discourses. Thus rising powers are not behaving as irresponsibly as many IR scholars assume.     

Understanding contested women’s rights in development: the Latin American campaign for the humanisation of birth and the challenge of midwifery in Mexico

This article builds on the recent debates on human rights and development to discuss the case of reproductive rights and midwifery activism as part of the broader mobilisation for the humanisation of birth and against obstetric violence in Latin America and Mexico. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the analysis shows how human rights continue to form a significant contentious and constructed terrain among women in the global South. The mobilisation for the humanisation of birth and against obstetric violence indicates how the clinical developmental view of reproductive rights is challenged by these activists as not necessarily safeguarding the rights of women during birth. In Mexico this campaign is essentially linked to the struggle to bring back and strengthen midwifery as a way of ensuring improved human rights in birth. The article concludes, however, that this campaign might be challenged by Indigenous rights in the near future.     

Russia,Chechnya and Strasbourg: Russian Official and Press Discourse on the ‘Chechen Cases’ at the European Court of Human Rights

This article explores contemporary Russian official and media discourse on cases concerning human rights violations in Chechnya which have been heard at the European Court of Human Rights. By comparing and contrasting the discourses on the Court's rulings which have been reproduced by various government representatives and various Russian newspapers, the article aims to demonstrate that, while official discourse remains critical of the Court's work with regard to Chechnya, reporting of such cases provides certain media outlets with the opportunity to criticise the government for its perceived failings in relation to safeguarding Chechnya's civilian population from human rights abuses.     

The Arabness of Middle East regionalism: the Arab Spring and competition for discursive hegemony between Egypt,Iran and Turkey

The Middle East is often considered to demonstrate a case of weak regionalism. This article suggests that the continued prevalence of Arab identity as the hegemonic component of regional consciousness contributes to this. The dominance of a discourse of ‘Arabness’ reduces the region's flexibility to adapt and develop regional institutions in several ways and particularly vis-a-vis the non-Arab communities and states that are found within the spatial boundaries of the Middle East. To explore the role played by Arab identity politics in regionalism with regard to the status of non-Arab states, this article presents a study of the competing hegemonic regional discourses employed by Turkey, Iran and Egypt during a two-year period following the 2011 uprising in Egypt. This analysis suggests that even during a time of crisis, non-Arab states face obstacles to their assertion of regional projects and that Arabness is a central factor in the narratives resisting alternative interpretations of the interests and definition of the Middle East as a region. The article concludes that Arabness forms the hegemonic discourse that shapes the international relations of the Middle East.     

Education,Development and the Imaginary Global Consensus: reframing educational planning dilemmas in the South

In the context of knowledge-intensive globalisation and severe poverty, policy makers in the South face various educational planning dilemmas. These are ultimately political, implying that there are no ways of avoiding tensions and trade-offs when attempting to handle them. Such dilemmas have been subject to debate in the research community and have been framed differently in different historical contexts. The contemporary development policy discourse, however, largely conceals the existence of dilemmas by suggesting that we have reached a global consensus regarding the role of education in development. This article illustrates that this consensus is imaginary and consequently aims to reframe educational planning dilemmas in the contemporary policy context. It is shown that the dilemmas have changed character and now largely revolve around how to navigate and negotiate in highly complex political landscapes. Future research should focus on such ongoing wars of position and expose the many tensions concealed by the hegemonic policy discourse.     

Russian Challenge to the EU’s Normative Power: Change and Continuity

The article examines how Russian criticism of the normative power Europe (NPE) has evolved. Initially Russia insisted that NPE arguments covered realpolitik. However, two new approaches have recently emerged in Russian reporting on human rights in the EU. One is the demonstration that the EU does not qualify as a normative power. Another is the development of an alternative interpretation of human rights. Russia has, therefore, mastered all NPE critiques. This has occurred as the result of a change in how Russia views international relations. Moscow’s ultimate goal has, however, remained unchanged; it is to reaffirm its equality with key global players.     

State Project Europe: The Transformation of the European Border Regime and the Production of Bare Life

Giorgio Agamben refers to a basic problem in the constitution of the modern nation state: the state as a nation implies that "bare life" becomes the foundation of sovereignty. With the loss of their citizenship, refugees lose not only all their rights, but more fundamentally the "right to have rights" (Arendt). This dilemma of modern statehood does not vanish under conditions of European integration; it is rather re-scaled. Applying a state-theoretical approach to the European border regime, we will concentrate on the two main techniques by which the EU produces "bare life": the "camp" and the invisible "police state." It will become apparent that the institutionalization of "the right of every human being to belong to mankind" is still lacking. Yet, in contrast to Agamben, we do not trace this constellation back to the collapse of the concept of human rights, but to hegemonies and power relations.     

Global poverty and orthodox security

This article examines the way in which the discourses of security and development have merged in the past decade as an important strand of global governance. It shows why this merging of discourses has occurred and assesses whether the newly embedded security-development discourse provides adequate conceptual tools for understanding the causes of global poverty. It concludes by setting out three paths that emerge from this security-development discourse and suggests that the ontological and epistemological claims at the heart of this understanding of International Relations and global poverty serve to reinforce global hierarchies of social power and privilege.     

Governance,Representation and International Aid

The growth of the postwar 20th century international aid architecture has generated much debate over the successes and failures of aid, its changing forms and its challenges. This article uses this aid landscape to explore the representational or discursive power and authority of the aid donor over the aid recipient. It suggests that representations about what aid does, its modalities and dispensations reproduce a hegemonic discourse and that representational authority in diagnosing aid’s problems and prescribing solutions resides generally on one side of the aid binary. It thus focuses on the hierarchical or asymmetric relations of power implied by such a binary, on the way development aid in particular has come to shape self-understandings of donors in relation to recipients, and on the discursive labour that enables such a construction. It also explores how the post-Washington consensus on poverty eradication has embedded neoliberal solutions to development. The reproduction of the hegemonic aid discourse is examined in reference to NGOs involved in the dispensing of aid in Southeast Asia by drawing on scholarly literature and field research in Southeast Asia and Washington DC.     

The Public Governance of Collaborative Spaces: Discourse, Design and Democracy

This article investigates the relationship between democratic practices and the design of institutions operating in collaborative spaces, those policy and spatial domains where multiple public, private and non-profit actors join together to shape, make and implement public policy. Partnerships are organizational manifestations of institutional design for collaboration. They offer flexibility and stakeholder engagement, but are loosely coupled to representative democratic systems. A multi-method research strategy examines the impact of discourses of managerialism, consociationalism and participation on the design of partnerships in two UK localities. Analysing objective measures of democratic performance in partnerships and interpreting the discursive transition from earlier practices in representative democratic institutions we find that institutional designs for collaboration reflect different settlements between discourses, captured in the distinction between club, agency and polity-forming partnership types. The results show how the governance of collaborative spaces is mediated through a dominant set of discursively defined institutional practices.     

Enforcing labour rights of irregular migrants in Indonesia

The multi-directional nature of labour migration flows has resulted in an increasing number of countries having become both senders and receivers of regular and irregular migrants. However, some countries continue to see themselves primarily as senders and so ignore their role as a receiving country, which can have negative implications for the rights of migrants in their territory. Using the example of Indonesia, which is State Party to the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families, this article demonstrates that irregular migrant workers in this country have the legal right to protection against labour exploitation even when they work despite the government’s prohibition on employment. The article discusses the ‘right to work’ and how international human rights law has translated it into the ‘right to protection from labour exploitation’ for irregular migrants in Indonesia. By way of two case studies about the Indonesian government’s handling of irregular migrants, it shows how it prioritises enforcement of the employment immigration law over labour and employment laws much like countries that have not ratified the ICRMW. It also draws attention to legal protection gaps that emerge for asylum seekers when they are recognised to be genuine refugees.     

Tensions in the discourse and practice of the European Union's Aid for Trade

The contemporary global Aid for Trade (AfT) agenda emerged out of world trade negotiations and it could have profound implications for the future of development aid, depending on how it is interpreted. The European Union (EU) has recontextualised this global agenda to suit its own approach to trade and development; specifically a focus on regional integration, and free market but ‘pro-poor’ development models. AfT is ascribed a variety of purposes in EU texts and its use continues to adapt as the EU's trade and development policy evolves. Institutionally the AfT framework has not strongly affected EU processes, organisational structures or methodology. A study of the use of EU aid for regional integration reveals dissonance between its development relationship and its trade policies while a focus on pro-poor AfT reveals a lack of capacity. Overall, there are tensions not just between discourse and practice but between different discourses of the EU.     

The Discourse of Development: has it reached maturity?

Like most other concepts in the social sciences, ‘development’ does not entail a commonly agreed upon meaning, context or programme of action. It is defined in different ways depending on the time, space, context, professional and organisational interests of the one who does the business of defining. The meaning of development has also undergone a remarkable transformation over the course of history from the Enlightenment concept of ‘Progress’ to encompass a great variety of human needs. This paper analyses how the contemporary discourse of development has reached a mature state and how it enables us to understand development in context- and culture-sensitive ways. It is now possible to determine what development means in different settings, and how to bring in material and non-material prosperity to people living in different contexts and cultures. After a theoretical discussion an empirical study in Sri Lanka is presented which attempts to arrive at a more refined context- and culture-sensitive definition of development. The paper argues that, in order to understand development at micro-settings, it is better to construct our own indexes of development rather than using global measures. It shows how the current state of the discourse of development can lend insights into construction of a development index.     

Mining and subaltern politics: political struggle against neoliberal development in Bangladesh

Drawing on social movement scholarship, this paper analyses subaltern struggles against a multinational mining company. The Phulbari coal mine is the centre of contention between the mining company and local/national activists. Local concerns about the dispossession of lands and livelihoods and environmental destruction have been merged with a Leftist political agenda on the growing vulnerability of the state and national sovereignty in the Global South. A close examination of the movement's discourses suggests that a broader political struggle against resource plunder and energy imperialism has been strengthened by local community resistance to an environmentally destructive coal mine. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews, I analyse how activists have created new meanings of the conflict to confront and delegitimize hegemonic discourses of capitalist development and modernity.