Description
Much of human rights scholarship still implicitly relies on civil society as a catch-all social ontology that encompasses a plethora of non-state actors. This paper challenges this notion, advocating instead for using ‘civil society’ as a method to explore the social dynamics that enable the realization of human rights. To illustrate this move, we provide a basic outline of what human rights scholarship can learn from the study of what we call ‘city society’. Con-ceptualized not as a residual category but an increasingly important field in the standard-setting and delivery of human rights, city society may take on two forms. On the one hand, we see the emergence of a ‘society of cities’ in the shape of transnational assemblages that have a stake in both the standard-setting and the enforcement of human rights. Their compo-sition and actions defy classical distinctions between state and ‘civil society’ as its relations to national and supranational actors are sometimes reinforcing and sometimes antagonistic. On the other hand, it is necessary to consider a ‘societies in cities’ consisting of actors who engage human rights locally with a view to day-to day policy-making. Here, politicians, civil servants, local NGOs and universities may even work side by side, thus bringing about assemblages that are simultaneously situated within public and private spheres of governance. Based on the example of city society we call for human rights scholars to 1) develop a grounded approach to understanding how, where, by whom and why specifically human rights are mobilized in this day and age, 2) study these processes in an interdisciplinary manner bringing about ‘thick’ descriptions, and 3) link these societal processes to the further development of human rights law.| Period | 21 Feb 2018 |
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| Event title | The Challenges of Human Rights Scholarship |
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Berlin, GermanyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |