Vulnerabilisation: Between mainstreaming and human rights overreach
| Author | Viljam Engström,Maija Mustaniemi-Laakso,Mikaela Heikkilä |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09240519221092599 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Vulnerabilisation: Between
mainstreaming and human
rights overreach
Viljam Engström , Mikaela Heikkilä
Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics/Institute for Human Rights, Åbo
Akademi University, Finland
Maija Mustaniemi-Laakso
Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
Abstract
There is an ongoing process of ‘vulnerabilisation’of international protection. This process is the
outcome of the establishment of special protection regimes within human rights law and of
extending and specifying the scope of existing norms. Vulnerabilisation also increasingly takes
place through the expansion of the sphere of international actors embedding the protection of
vulnerable groups as a core element of their policymaking. This article takes hold of this ongoing
vulnerabilisation and sets out to explore some of its consequences. Vulnerabilisation, the article
claims, is a necessary and important element of ensuring protection of those most in need.
However, the development also comes with possible downsides. Vulnerability-reasoning enables
selectivity and prioritisation, which can turn into exclusion and politicisation. The vulnerabilisation
phenomenon also comes with compartmentalisation and potential instrumentalisation of protec-
tion. As such, vulnerabilisation walks a tightrope between mainstreaming and overreach.
Keywords
Human rights, special protection, social protection, vulnerability, mainstreaming
1. INTRODUCTION
Enduring societal problems, such as social marginalisation, inequality, and discrimination, are
nowadays often addressed through the special protection of individuals and groups. Those
Corresponding author:
Viljam Engström, Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics/Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University,
Finland.
Email: viljam.engstrom@abo.fi
Article
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights
2022, Vol. 40(2) 118–136
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09240519221092599
journals.sagepub.com/home/nqh
eligible for special treatment have traditionally been given labels such as the ‘marginalised’,the
‘disadvantaged’or the ‘discriminated’. Today, these groups are commonly subsumed under the
concept ‘vulnerable’, even to the point where the vulnerability rhetoric is referred to as the new
‘lingua franca of global and international justice’.
1
There appears to be widespread consensus
that special or targeted measures are needed to overcome persisting injustices and ensure the
universality of human rights.
Many scholars have, during the last decade, paid attention to the increased use of vulnerabil-
ity argumentation in international law and politics, for example, in the case law of the European
Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) and the practice of the United Nations (UN) treaty
bodies.
2
The vulnerabilisation phenomenon takes place on many different fronts.
3
On the one
hand, it is an outcome of the establishment of special protection regimes within human rights
law −such as the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2006 Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Disability Convention) −and of extending and specifying
the scope of existing norms in respect of the vulnerable through interpretation. Both of these
processes aim at ensuring that groups and individuals who traditionally have not seen their
human rights fully realised would do so. In the human rights context, vulnerability is thus gen-
erally invoked to point to protection gaps and to specify –or particularise –States’obligations
to respond to the specific protection needs of particular individuals or groups.
4
On the other
hand, vulnerabilisation is taking place through an expanding sphere of international organisa-
tions and other actors, elevating the protection of vulnerable groups into an element of their
policy-making.
5
Along with ‘social protection’emerging as a central paradigm of global
policy-making, the protection of vulnerable groups has simultaneously grown into one of its
core embodiments. Vulnerabilisation, in other words, not only affects the application and inter-
pretation of human rights law but is also mainstreamed beyond the framework of that particular
legal regime.
The existing scholarship on vulnerabilisation has so far mainly focused on establishing this phe-
nomenon by identifying various references to vulnerability in, for example, case law and instru-
ments produced by international actors. Much of this scholarship points out that the merits of
1. Alyson Cole, ‘All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of
Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique’(2016) 17 Critical Horizons 260, 263.
2. See, for example, Alexandra Timmer, ‘A Quiet Revolution: Vulnerability in the European Court of Human Rights’in
Martha Albertson Fineman and Anna Grear (eds), Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law
and Politics (Ashgate 2013) 147; Ingrid Nifosi-Sutton, The Protection of Vulnerable Groups under International
Human Rights Law (Routledge 2017).
3. Brown talks about the ‘vulnerability zeitgeist’, Kate Brown, ‘Questioning the Vulnerability Zeitgeist: Care and Control
Practices with “Vulnerable”Young People’(2014) 13 Social Policy & Society 371.
4. See, for example, Mikaela Heikkilä, Hisayo Katsui and Maija Mustaniemi-Laakso, ‘Disability and Vulnerability: A
Human Rights Reading of the Responsive State’(2020) 24 The International Journal of Human Rights 1180. In this
article, the concept of ‘particularisation’is used to denote the use of special measures for particular individuals or
groups. Often this particularisation concurs with ‘vulnerabilisation’, which here is used to refer to particularisation
that takes place to ensure that rights or interests of individuals or groups defined as vulnerable (or the like) are realised.
Sometimes, the authors also use the concept of ‘special protection’to refer to the same turn to vulnerabilisation/
particularisation.
5. For an overview of social protection policies of international organisations, seeViljam Engström and Alina Vegar, ‘Social
Protection Policies of International Organizations’(2021) Åbo Akademi University, Institute for Human Rights Working
Paper 1/2021, fi/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-Engstrom-and-Vegar-Social-Protection-Policies-
of-IOs.pdf> accessed 11 November 2021.
Engström et al. 119
To continue reading
Request your trial