27

Apr

Pre-defense seminar in Human Rights Studies: Therese Boje Mortensen

27 April 2023 10:15 Seminar

Therese Boje Mortensen is a PhD-student in Human Rights Studies. This is the pre-defense seminar of her thesis project with the working title "Partnering for Human Rights Duties? An ethnography of the NGO-state partnership CHILDLINE in rights-based and neoliberal India." Discussant is Malin Arvidson, associate professor at the School of Social Work. For a copy of the thesis draft, contact the supervisor at lena.halldenius@mrs.lu.se. All are welcome!

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) increasingly enter into partnerships with states to implement human rights, a phenomenon that has been studied both as a necessary inclusion of civil society in human rights practice, and as a slippery slope towards a neoliberal state retreat. What remains to be studied is how this partnership practice shapes the concepts of human rights and their duty bearers. Through an ethnographic conceptual analysis, this dissertation analyses NGO-state partnerships in the paradoxically both rights-based and neoliberal Indian state. My case study is CHILDLINE, India’s national child helpline that is financed by the central government, managed by a foundation and implemented by small NGOs. I show how in this context, a specific articulation of rights and duties was prevalent, namely one that emphasised “everyone’s” duty – society’s, the state’s, parents’, businesses’, NGOs’, communities’, “stakeholders’” – for realising children’s rights. It was an articulation that had marks from both rights-based thinking, from neoliberal thinking, and from sevā, or “service”-based thinking. It was in curious contrast to what I call the hegemonic version of human rights duties, where children have a right by their state to be protected. I also found that in practice, NGOs took upon themselves the role to fill “gaps” in the state’s lacking rights regime which, in their view, only existed “on paper.” I prompt us to think about these “gaps” between formal and everyday conceptualisations, and between law and practice, as not simply unfortunate or a parenthesis before we reach an ideal human rights state, but rather as an empirical reality of what rights are. Human rights are never fully implemented. Rather, implementation is a constant exercise between pressure on the state, action from the state, and filling gaps in the state’s implementation. I argue that the conceptual production and practice of human rights should not only be taken seriously when it comes from “hegemonic” or “vernacular” spaces, but also from these messy “semi-governmental” spaces in which rights and duties are practiced – such as NGO-state partnerships where NGOs are institutionalised as permanent “gap fillers.”

About the event:

27 April 2023 10:15

Location:
LUX, Helgonavägen 3, room A332

Contact:
lena.halldeniusmrs.luse

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