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- Sundkvist, Emma
(author)
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Human Rights as Space-Making : Bodily Performative Activism Against Sexual Violence in Egypt
- 2023
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In: Nordic Journal of Human Rights. - 1891-8131 .- 1891-814X. ; 41:2, s. 133-150
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article introduces the concept of space-making as a form of human rights activism. To develop the concept, I use the example of contentious street activism against sexual violence in post-2011 Egypt. My research has found that feminist activists utilised human rights as a legal tool for improving legislation and policy and as a linguistic strategy to challenge derogatory discourse. Using human rights in these two ways required that activists identify violations of rights and articulate their demands. Yet the contentious street activism in Egypt against sexual violence did not contain verbal utterances, so it cannot be captured through these two dimensions of human rights. In this article, I explore how to capture and analyse activism that sits within a human rights framework, but which is devoid of specific rights claims or clarified motives, where the focus seems instead to be on the public space. By engaging with theories of performativity, vulnerability, rights claiming, and subjectivisation, I argue that through modes of activism against sexual violence that take the form of performative bodily enactments of space, people convert themselves into the human rights subjects they are told they cannot be.
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- Lindkvist, Linde, Högskolelektor, 1985-
(author)
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1979: a Year of the Child, but Not of Children’s Human Rights
- 2019
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In: Diplomatica. - : Brill. - 2589-1766 .- 2589-1774. ; 1:2, s. 202-220
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article explores the diplomatic contestations over children’s rights in connection to the International Year of the Child (iyc) of 1979. At the time, the Year was celebrated as an outstanding success, an event which helped to heighten social and political awareness of the status of children in both developing and industrialized countries, and which brought to light a plethora of new global issues, including street children, children with disabilities and children in armed conflict. Today, the iyc is frequently reduced to a plotting point in histories charting the rise of an international discourse of children’s rights, a discourse that is intimately linked to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989. This article shows how the concept of children’s rights was of peripheral importance to the overarching purposes of the iyc, which instead revolved around a notion of child welfare as integral to wider projects of social and economic development, either in the form of economic sovereignty or basic needs. The article then revisits the 1978–1979 UN debates on a human rights treaty for children, showing how this project initially garnered minimal support among states, international agencies and non-state actors. The article thus takes issue with teleological accounts that see the iyc primarily as a first step toward the subsequent breakthrough of children’s human rights. It also showcases how historical case studies of UN observances can be fruitful for scholars interested in the clashes and amalgamations of competing concepts and projects at an international level.
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