Localizing Rights: Evolving Conceptions of Human Rights in Southern Africa
About the Project: This project is about understanding what human rights mean to civil society activists in Botswana and South Africa.
Human rights are an increasingly popular language of civil society advocacy internationally, but does this concept mean the same thing in different places? While a body of work examines local understandings of rights elsewhere in the world, little research has been conducted on human rights discourse in Africa. My postdoctoral project examines how “human rights” are understood in Southern Africa through a comparative study examining civil society organizations in neighbouring countries with very different advocacy cultures (South Africa and Botswana). I am interested to find out how local understandings of human rights are similar to or different from dominant international understandings of human rights. I am also curious to see whether local cultural and philosophical concepts influence how human rights are understood, used and explained in this context.
Update: Field research took place in Botswana (Gaborone, Maun), and South Africa (Gauteng, Limpopo) between March and May, and October and December 2015.
Knowledge Sharing and Outputs
Findings have been shared through presentations with two participant organizations in Botswana and South Africa, presented at a university workshop in South Africa, and presented at conferences and workshops in Canada, the United States and Poland.
Kenyon, Kristi Heather. 2015. “Localizing the Global/Globalizing the Local: Reconciling Botho and Human Rights in Botswana,” in Social Practice of Human Rights, ed. Joel Pruce. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 101-120.