Transition Land: I'm interested by your line that Neha's point"might be just as foolish as sloppy, ill-informed advocacy." Can you present an argument for this?

Neha: I find your argument regarding rights unconvincing, although I've heard it before in a number of contexts. We can acknowledge that values differ from people to people, but we also have to acknowledge that we - as individuals and societies - find some of those values unacceptable. This is the fundamental tension that goes back to the development of classical liberalism, but it's not insoluble; to paraphrase in a possibly vulgar way, his rights to practise traditional culture ends where her clitoris begins.

The argument about this tension between individualistic/western and communitarian/non-western conceptions of human rights has of course most often been used in the Asian context. Usually in those contexts it has been used as a cover for human rights abuses, most notably the harsh repression of local human rights activitists. Does this not make you uneasy about deploying it in the context of Sudan, even while you argue for more support to local human rights activists there?

Hi transitionland,

Thank you for the comments. Apologies if what I was saying seemed sloppy or foolish. To explain a little bit: this was a dialogue that Michael and I had after the last article on advocacy I did. Therefore the references to Africa were a result of this last article, and of course because that is my area of interest / knowledge / experience. Also the dialogue was not split into three - it was one long conversation; therefore these comments are not an argument in themselves.

Of course every region / country / community has differences. When I speak of Western, I am speaking of the Western modernized system of thinking and doing which pervades mainstream international advococy practice (based around international human rights discourse). I do not argue about what is 'wrong' or 'right' but emphasize that values shape our thinking; therefore different values call for different thinking. 

I hope these clarifications are helpful.

Perhaps an essential phase in developing advocacy and intervention plans in any community is to first understand the norms of that community (I assume this usually does not happen, for example, who knows how thick a stick it is acceptible to beat your wife with in Dinka culture? answer:no thicker than  man's thumb.), and then developing policy from there.
We can oppose the abuse of women and girls, or pre-pubescent marriage, or anything else we believe is 'bad' as long as we acknowledge that we are not basing this on some universal idea, but on our conception of the good. Then it falls to us to make the case that not marrying a 12 year old to a 72 year old is no good, or that beating anyone with any size stick isn't good either, but it is far more respectful than arguing that a culture is flying in the face of universal values and they just don't know it. We have to acknowledge in human rights discourse that we are not defining universal rights, but prescribing rights we intend to pursue with the various forms of power at our disposal. We have basic beliefs in the dignity of the individual, and we are going to try to spread them. Others have other beliefs. We must listen and learn about these beliefs, accomodate when we can. But we won't always be able to. And this is where power, dangerously, comes in. I like your recommendation for CAUTION. In the end, caution is the only foolproof policy.

Paul thank you for the very interesting and difficult question.

Universal values are difficult to define or pin down. Lets take the example of female genital mutilation: the very term carries values and moral judgements. Yes, it is a practice that endangers the health and reproductive systems of women. It can be a traumatising experience. Can it also not have beneficial functions such as affirming membership in a community and reinforcing a sense of value in a person? The most important questions is though "Who should decide if the practice is good or bad, and how?" Abdullahi An' Naim's answer would be through cross-cultural and inter-cultural dialogue, rather than text-book criteria. I'm sure there are many possible answers and we should explore them.

The individualistic/communitarian argument is the best articulated one, but there are others. Whether these arguments have been used to cover abuse, shouldn't detract from their validity. If we really want to get regimes to respect citizens then we should work towards a system where there can be little argument no?

Universal values are difficult to define or pin down.

I'm not sure that they are, if by universal we mean values that we seek for people everywhere.

Lets take the example of female genital mutilation: the very term carries values and moral judgements. Yes, it is a practice that endangers the health and reproductive systems of women. It can be a traumatising experience. Can it also not have beneficial functions such as affirming membership in a community and reinforcing a sense of value in a person?

It might have those beneficial functions, but it seems doubtful that they overcome the very basic disadvantage of removing a body part. Let's do a thought experiment, and say that we live in a country where everybody is blind because all children have their eyes removed with a sharp spoon at birth. Now certainly having one's eyes removed makes one part of the community, but I don't find that a good enough reason for spooning out childrens' eyes. Ditto the excision of the clitoris.

The individualistic/communitarian argument is the best articulated one, but there are others. Whether these arguments have been used to cover abuse, shouldn't detract from their validity. If we really want to get regimes to respect citizens then we should work towards a system where there can be little argument no?

My point was more that a) I almost always hear arguments about how "western" rights are inappropriate from people who are trying to defend their positions of power, not from the people whose rights are being abused, and b) I almost never hear an actual argument regarding their validity - the argument is used used to close down discourse rather than open it up. Both of these make me very suspicious indeed.