Practicing Human Rights: How Human Rights Practitioners Shape the Field (abstract)

This working paper summarises my initial findings of a study into the politics of human rights practice looking specifically at how practitioners shape the human rights field. Through a series of interviews with lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats and activists I have mapped the ‘work’ that takes place within the field of human rights and analysed how this ‘work’ shapes what Nash (2009) refers to as the cultural politics of human rights. Within the national and international arenas, human rights practices are cultural capital that practitioners trade for political gains. In order to assure the future of the human rights movement we need to understand how people become involved and what motivation keeps them there. As such I have asked interviewees to comment on how they see the field of human rights, how their ‘work’ fits within the field and their own career trajectories