From Words to Action: The Anthropology of Human Rights
The Role of Language and Messaging in the Work of Human Rights Organizations

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed 60 years ago, a major concern surrounded enforcement mechanisms: who or what would ensure that the rights espoused in the UDHR would be respected and upheld? While the issue is still very much relevant (and problematic), a wide variety of civil society organizations—Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are just two of them—have emerged to compel states to respect the rights of their citizens by recording abuses and articulating solutions. As former Carr Center Director Michael Ignatieff has argued, this proliferation of “watch-dog” groups constitutes nothing less than "an advocacy revolution… [resulting in] the emergence of a network of nongovernmental organizations to pressure states to practice what they preach.”

Thousands of civil society organizations have sprung up to contest state power, defend the needs of the marginalized, and advocate for a more peaceful and dignified world. But these groups are not all acting in the same way, with the same messages, on the same issues. Given that human rights contains a broad set of diverse and mutable meanings, and that within this field of diffuse meanings, human rights organizations must obviously pursue a narrower variety of activities and objectives, we are interested in exploring the following: What, specifically, is being done? When the phrase “human rights” is used, what it is being used for? What is it not being used for? What does it mean? What does it not mean? What is at stake when civil society organizations choose to direct their advocacy efforts in certain directions and not others? Is there any way to talk about one human rights project, or “revolution,” in such a way that implies coherence, consistency, or consensus?

The Anthropology of Human Rights Project tackles these questions in the hopes of illuminating, if not resolving, some of the tensions inherent in “human rights work,” namely, whether or not it is advantageous to have multiple conceptions of human rights operating at the same time. How does this diversity (or divergence) of meaning—this combination of visions, messages, activities, and concerns that characterize this array of organizations—affect our sense of what kinds of human rights claims or campaigns are most important? Does the primacy of certain conceptions of human rights degrade the integrity of others? Can multiple human rights claims co-exist equally? And how does all of this affect policy?

To begin to answer these questions, this project will: (1) conduct an analysis of human rights organization messages (examining founding constitutions and key documents); and (2) juxtapose these messages with the activities that are conducted by these organizations through various campaigns and projects. The project will analyze the work these groups choose to take on—coding them according to which kind of human rights violations they seek to address, and exploring, together with the organizations themselves, how they make decisions about which projects and campaigns to pursue. The ultimate goal of this project is to gain a better understanding of how and why human rights organizations do the work that they do.

This research is being led by Elliott Prasse-Freeman (Associate Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and MPA-ID candidate, Harvard Kennedy School) and Sarah Bouchat (Associate Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and MPP candidate, Harvard Kennedy School).

Please contact us if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.
We can be reached at prasse@post.harvard.edu 
and sarah_bouchat@hks11.harvard.edu.