Lorenzo Cotula (International Institute for Environment and Development; University of Strathclyde – Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance; Warwick Law School, GLOBE Centre) has posted Between Hope and Critique: Human Rights, Social Justice and Re-Imagining International Law from the Bottom Up (Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 48, No. 2, 2020) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
At a time when many social movements mobilise human rights to frame their advocacy, a growing body of critique has questioned the viability of human rights as a vehicle for social justice. International law has long provided fertile ground for the interplay of human rights claims and social justice advocacy, so the critique raises questions about the theory and practice of international law. This article reflects on the place of human rights in strategies to advance social justice. It argues that, while some critique takes aim at an encompassing human rights “project”, the contested nature of human rights calls for more granular analyses that consider the diverse constellations of actors, agendas, arenas and approaches connecting human rights to social justice. Taking a socio-legal approach, the article examines indigenous peoples’ use of regional human rights systems to defend or reclaim their ancestral lands, and agrarian movements’ advocacy for the recently adopted United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. These two case studies provide insights on the ways in which social actors, including those outside the mainstream “human rights movement”, have appropriated and reconfigured human rights to reclaim land, resources and territories, to renegotiate control over development pathways, and ultimately to challenge parameters of global economic ordering – such as the legal foundations of extractivism and the structure of food systems. The findings suggest that, while critiques of rights identify real problems, shifting the focus from institutionalised human rights actors and frameworks, to rights-claiming as a practice of contestation, can unlock more hopeful insights on the conditions under which human rights can sustain transformative agendas.