Human Rights and Social Movements by Neil Stammers & Robert Jupe & Jane Andrew

Author:Neil Stammers & Robert Jupe & Jane Andrew [Stammers, Neil & Jupe, Robert & Andrew, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Advocacy, History & Theory, Political Science, Political Process, Human Rights
ISBN: 9780745329123
Google: _jswAQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 5487298
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2009-05-15T09:59:20+00:00

6

EXPRESSIVE AND INSTRUMENTAL DIMENSIONS OF MOVEMENT ACTIVISM

This chapter explores the analytical significance of non-legal and pre-legal forms of human rights as movement generated social processes – a sort of combined culture and politics ‘from below’. To the extent that non-legal aspects appear at all in the specialist academic literature on human rights, they typically appear in a ‘top-down’ focus whereby law is assumed to ‘lead’ culture. So the orientation adopted here requires us to reconsider two basic questions ‘where do human rights come from?’ and ‘how do non-legal forms of human rights relate to human rights as law?’ Although this chapter involves something of a pause in my account of the history of human rights, it is only something of a pause because the intellectual debates discussed below have their own very distinct history. They arose as a response to the emergence and rise of the so-called New Social Movements, illustrating the more general point made throughout this study that ideas and intellectual developments around human rights have often arisen from movement praxis.

By the end of this chapter I will be in a position to examine what I call the ‘expressive/instrumental dynamic’ of social movement activism and how this impacts on the social construction of human rights. But in order to get there I need to take a somewhat circuitous route. Firstly it is necessary to specify what I mean by expressive and instrumental dimensions of movement activism and explain why this terminology is preferable to, and provides more purchase on, the link between human rights and social movements than debates that focus on interests, identities and recognition. Particular emphasis is placed on delineating my usage of the term ‘expressive’ because it may be unfamiliar to many readers. The term ‘instrumental’ is clarified through, and in conjunction with, my more detailed discussion of the expressive dimension. These tasks are made especially difficult because of the ways that the terms instrumental and expressive have been used in social theory and because of the range and complexity of recent debates around identity, difference and recognition. It is impossible to do justice to these various debates, so those familiar with them may find my discussion overly superficial. Conversely, those unfamiliar with such debates might suspect that this part of my overall argument is tangential and doubt its relevance. To both concerns, I can only reiterate my conviction that a proper grasp and conceptualisation of these dimensions of movement activism is crucial to understanding not just the link between social movement and human rights, but also the possibilities for how human rights might play a positive part in future transformative social change. In particular, this chapter forces open a range of key questions: the nature of the relationship between formal and substantive rationalities and how these link to expressive and instrumental dimensions of movement activism; the relationship between means and ends; the place of ‘strategy’ in the history of creative human rights praxis, and the question of the ‘fixity’ of law. On this last

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