Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle

TLDR

Transnational human rights approaches to violence against women must be translated into local contexts, yet the pathways and intermediary roles that enable or constrain this translation are not well understood. The article theorizes the translation process and argues that anthropological analysis of translators clarifies how human rights ideas circulate and transform social life. The study examines translators—community leaders, NGO participants, and activists—as knowledge brokers who mediate between global human rights discourses and local cultural practices.

Abstract

How do transnational ideas such as human rights approaches to violence against women become meaningful in local social settings? How do they move across the gap between a cosmopolitan awareness of human rights and local sociocultural understandings of gender and family? Intermediaries such as community leaders, nongovernmental organization participants, and social movement activists play a critical role in translating ideas from the global arena down and from local arenas up. These are people who understand both the worlds of transnational human rights and local cultural practices and who can look both ways. They are powerful in that they serve as knowledge brokers between culturally distinct social worlds, but they are also vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by states and communities. In this article, I theorize the process of translation and argue that anthropological analysis of translators helps to explain how human rights ideas and interventions circulate around the world and transform social life.