Human rights brought home : domestication of human rights discourse in Vienna

This thesis examines domestication of human rights discourse through the world society theory which explains the spreading of human rights as a part of the world culture. The international community has built a vast network of legal instruments and policy models which help to respect, protect, and promote human rights around the globe. Yet, the domestication of human rights involves not only legal tools and official policies, but also promotion of common understandings about human rights as moral principles. This turns my attention to the local policy-making and local actors which are key players in fitting the human rights in the local environment. Despite the growing interest in local implementation of international human rights norms, few studies have investigated the discursive side of this process. This thesis contributes to filling of this gap by conducting a case study focusing on the city of Vienna in Austria. In this thesis, discourse analysis is used as a methodological approach to analyse the city council debate over a human rights city declaration. My approach is further guided by interpretive policy analysis in considering how human rights are framed by the various parties to the debate. The analysis is formed around five discourses which are used in the city council to give meaning to human rights. These are moral, legal, functionality, credibility and modernity discourses. Each discourse frames the issue in a different way which has consequences for the proposed policy solutions. Furthermore, while some arguments for strengthening the human rights work in the city are relevant in a certain frame, in another discourse they can seem nonsensical. The results of the study emphasis how crucial the domestication of international ideas is in order for the international human rights ideas to be truly manifested in everyday life of people. However, the persistent focus on local political hot topics shows that the impact of world culture is blurred with locally relevant issues. Hence, I argue that the significance of local actors is great in determining whether international ideas gain local legitimacy or not. Yet, many elements of the council discourses are better explained through world culture and globally shared scripts than conventional local politics. Thus, I suggest that globalisation affects the local decision-making to an extent which goes way beyond legal standards