Anthropological Exploration of the Contention and Cooperation in International Rights Policies

Cuny Hunter College, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This study seeks to understand how international policy surrounding rights evolves among world policymakers. As global communication brings previously disconnected groups closer together, debates about rights are a focal point for understanding the preconditions for stable political and economic relationships between nations. This project focuses specifically on peasants, a group which has historically made up a bulk of the literature in cultural anthropology. The UN approved a landmark Declaration on Indigenous Rights in 2007 and is now moving to strengthen human rights protections for the one-third of the global population that consists of peasants, small farmers, and landless laborers. With the creation in 2012 of a new UN Intergovernmental Working Group on a Peasants' Rights Declaration, transnational agrarian movements hope to follow the example of the indigenous movements. This project's questions include: (1) How does the peasants' rights process reflect and/or contribute to norms evolution? (2) How do peasant stakeholders and their allies make their voices heard in the Intergovernmental Working Group and strategize to influence its activities? (3) What institutional changes in the UN will emerge from the Working Group? And (4) how have understandings of human rights changed since they initiated the campaign for a new rights instrument? The project employs documentary research, key informant interviews, and intensive participant observation in Geneva during all key periods when the peasants' rights Declaration is under consideration. The new Working Group provides an extraordinary opportunity to observe processes that are central to human rights scholarship in and outside of anthropology. It contributes to three bodies of scholarship: (1) contentious politics and transnational social movements; (2) the anthropology of human rights; and (3) the anthropology of the UN and research on how civil society influences global governance. This research has broad societal impacts through enhancing our understanding of the evolution of international cooperation. The project also broadens participation of underrepresented groups in a STEM discipline by involving undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented groups in the analysis of data.