6 - “Together for Rights”

Summary

Considers how rights have been used to address economic and social justice. Social and economic justice advocates turned toward what is commonly called a rights-based approach to development, beginning in the 1990s. The case study in this chapter traces how and why Oxfam recast its goals as a set of what it called “basic rights.” Incorporated original interviews and archival research to outline Oxfam’s adoption of human rights language in its aid and economic justice advocacy work. Rights-based advocacy by development groups was taken up at the same time that traditional human rights NGOs hotly debated how and whether to take up economic, social, and cultural rights more directly. Argues that the emergence of rights arguments in development work demonstrate the potential flexibility of human rights tools in justice-seeking.