Girls rising for human rights: Not magic, politics
| Date | 01 February 2016 |
| Published date | 01 February 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088215613626 |
| Author | Brooke A. Ackerly |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(1) 26 –41
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088215613626
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Girls rising for human rights:
Not magic, politics
Brooke A. Ackerly
Vanderbilt University, USA
Abstract
“Girls rising” offers a grounded, critical, and human rights theory of political responsibility
for global injustice. This theory of human rights tells us not just what rights are but how
to take responsibility for bringing about their enjoyment for all. It grounds a theory
of human rights in the political view of human beings as fundamentally relational and
human rights as fundamentally collectively enjoyed. Using girls’ education activism as an
illustrative issue area, it outlines five political practices and what they tell us about how
to take political responsibility for human rights, in a rights-based way.
Keywords
Critical theory, development, human rights, praxis, responsibility
Introduction
Girls’ education has been a recurring darling of corporate social responsibility philanthropy.
From Nike’s 2008 “Girl Effect” campaign1 to KPMG’s 2013 support of the “Because I am
a Girl” campaign (KPMG International, 2014), the path to development is through the
school of a girl. However, the role of human rights in promoting girls’ education has been
limited to their “right to education.”2 Yet, as Nike found during their initial investment in
girls’ education, the path is neither direct nor certain. It is not direct because the meaning of
development is politically contested. And it is not certain because the key to development is
not girls’ education alone, but rather all the other aspects of rights enjoyment taken together.
Molly (2013) Melching found this in her efforts to change a cultural practice:
For many years, our education program did not include discussions on basic human rights. We
were successful, but it was only after introducing human rights learning that an amazing thing
happened. I can’t explain it. It felt like magic. (2013: xi)
Corresponding author:
Brooke A. Ackerly, Vanderbilt University, 2301 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN 37235, USA.
Email: brooke.ackerly@vanderbilt.edu
613626IPT0010.1177/1755088215613626Journal of International Political TheoryAckerly
research-article2015
Article
Ackerly 27
In fact, it wasn’t magic; it was politics. The political understanding of human rights is
the foundation of a rights-based approach to responsibility.
Across time, geography, and politics, theorists, policy makers, citizens, development
practitioners, and rabble rousers have argued or assumed that education is important to
individual and political life such that we are comfortable seeing education referred to
unproblematically as foundational to human rights and development. However, we
should rely on neither education nor human rights to work magic. Change comes through
politics.
Consistent with the range of actors who use human rights, the “we” of this essay is a
political “we” that includes theorists, policy makers, citizens, development practitioners,
and rabble rousers who do not share a common political community but who share a
political concern for human rights. I argue that this concern for human rights requires a
politics of human rights, based not in the power relations and normalization of the neo-
liberal political economy as feminists and critical theorists have worried3 but rather in the
political strategies and alliances for transforming these.
Whether imperial or emancipatory, there are two parts to a theory of human rights: (1)
the moral theory that humanity needs to arrange itself politically, economically, and
socially so that all humans can live a life worthy of being called human and (2) the politi-
cal theory of what political, economic, and social arrangements best achieve that life.
While theorizing of the first kind can be engaged in alone, from an arm chair or on a walk
in the woods, the second requires deep engagement with the power dynamics and rela-
tions in the world, with the public and with its problems (Dewey, [1927] 1954). Without
such engagement, a human rights theory and practice may reify oppressive hierarchies
and norms.
This theory-in-practice entails taking responsibility for unjust power relations, engag-
ing with them while trying to change them. This latter cannot be done by “the admission
of the [individual] claimant to the position of the subject of a widely available benefit or
position” (Douzinas, 2007: 107). However, my reasons for arguing so are different from
those of Douzinas. For Douzinas, the problem with Rancière’s effort to reclaim a critical
politics of human rights is that Rancière seems naive to the impossibility of transforming
power relations through a mechanism that requires taking up a particular subject posi-
tion. Douzinas (2007) is right: there are many who are “outside Rancière’s regime of
visibility” (2007: 107). However, in his account of the politics of human rights, Douzinas
contributes to that regime of invisibility of human rights claimants by denying that the
form of politics in which they engage is a human rights politics.
I argue that a grounded political theory of human rights provides a rights-based
approach to responsibility for human rights.4 This political understanding of rights has
guided the design and implementation of development policy and political action in
international conventions, been adopted as the guiding principles of institutions such as
the United Nations (UN) (and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UNWomen,
International Labour Organization (ILO), and United Nations Security Council (UNSC)),
and been articulated and rearticulated through the activism of “new” rights activists,
including women, children, lesbians, gays, people who identify as bisexual, transgender,
intersex or queer, people with disabilities, workers, indigenous people, and others whose
political rights are tenuous (Bob, 2009).5 Of course, among those who use “human
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