Maxine Molyneux

Doing the rights thing : rights-based development and Latin American NGOs

Introduction 1 Rights in development: Conceptual issues 2 Latin America: The right(s) time and the right(s) place 3 NGOs and rights approaches 4 Implementing rights: Participation, empowerment and governance 5 Campaigning for rights: Violence against women and womens citizenship 6 Meeting challenges: Problems with rights 7 Consequences: Organizational implications of the shift to rights 8 Case studies Conclusions Appendix Reference Index

Gender and the politics of rights and democracy in Latin America

List of Tables Abbreviations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors The Local, the Regional and the Global: Transforming the Politics of Rights M.Molyneux & N.Craske Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-making: Electoral Quotas and Womens Leadership in Latin America M.N.Htun & M.P.Jones Getting Rights for those without Representation: The Success of Conjunctural Coalition-building in Venezuela E.J.Friedman Taking the Law into their Own Hands: Women, Legal Reform and Legal Literary in Brazil F.Macaulay In Pursuit of the Right to be Free from Violence: The Womens Movements and State Accountability in Uruguay N.Johnson Constructing Citizenship in the Poblaciones of Santiago, Chile: The Role of Reproductive and Sexual Rights C.Willmott Indigenous Women, Rights and the Nation-State in the Andes S.A.Radcliffe Economic and Social Rights: Exploring Gender Differences in a Central American Context J.Gideon The Struggle by Latin America Feminists for Rights and Autonomy V.Vargas Index

Women's movements in international perspective

This wide-ranging collection of essays, written over some twenty years, engages fully the general debates over the politics of gender and appraises womens movements in widely varying societies.

The Local, the Regional and the Global: Transforming the Politics of Rights

This book addresses the recent evolution of women’s movements in Latin America, and, in so doing, seeks to demonstrate the wider rele-vance of this history for the comparative study of women’s rights. To those who live in conditions of stable democracy, issues of rights and legal reform tend not to appear urgent or pressing unless as occurred in regard to reproductive rights, social movements make them so. In Latin America where liberal guarantees had been violated by decades of authoritarian rule, women’s movements from the 1980s placed a special value on the ‘right to have rights’ and worked for the restoration of the rule of law, democracy and basic civil liberties. But at the same time, the language of rights and citizenship was deployed not only to restore or to improve upon formal legal rights, but also to deepen the democratic process. The affirmation of a culture of rights grew out of popular social movements in Latin America. ‘Rights talk’ was used to raise awareness among the poor and the socially marginal-ised of their formal legal rights, but also to call into question their lack of substantive rights. The language of rights thus became a way of making claims for social justice as well as for recognition in an idiom that framed such demands ‘as a basic right of citizenship’ (Baierle 1998: 124).