Sian Lazar

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

Education for Credit Development as Citizenship Project in Bolivia

This article investigates economic aspects of citizenship in El Alto, Bolivia, through an exploration of micro-credit NGOs working with female Aymara rural-urban migrants. Such NGOs operate from a basis of transnational discourses of citizenship conceived in an individualized neoliberal framework. Their activities can be understood as a set of citizenship projects which attempt to modify the ways in which individuals act as economic agents and view themselves. In recent years, the domain of the informal economy has become one of the key fields in which differing conceptions of individuality and citizenship are worked on by local people, the state and international agencies. The micro-credit NGOs’ focus on entrepreneurial activity assumes a market-based economic rationality, and combines this with capacity-building in a ‘human development’ model. This combination reveals much about the kinds of female citizens that governments and development agencies seek to create in Bolivia: ‘empowered’ individual, entrepreneurial, active citizens, who will take responsibility for their own and their families’ welfare, and who are prepared for the market rather than the state to provide for their social rights. This article will argue that these attempts to extend Liberal citizenship through debt are undermined in two ways: first, because the women’s responses to the educational components are complex and not always accepting; and, second, because the NGOs themselves rely upon a collective, embedded economic rationality of kinship and social control to ensure the re-payment of loans.

Citizenship, the self, and political agency

The articles in this special issue start from the premise that citizenship is more than the legal status of member of a national political community with certain rights and responsibilities (Marshall, 1983). We contend that citizenship is an important and helpful way of framing anthropological enquiry into politics. The authors ask how citizenship is experienced in any given context, and thereby explore how particular political communities and political agency are constituted.

Citizenship Quality: A New Agenda for Development?

Contemporary work on citizenship questions the classic liberal version of citizenship as a legal status belonging to citizens of a particular nation-state. It recognizes the contingencies of political membership and the nature of citizenship as a mechanism for making claims upon different kinds of political communities, especially the state. Until recently, this was not a domain contemplated in mainstream development models. Even if issues such as governance have entered development agendas, the overall tone of the debate still focuses on technical rather than political questions. In this article, I argue that citizenship ideas can bring a particular politics and ethics into ‘development’, possible because of tensions between normative notions of citizenship and competing claims for more radical versions. I begin with an exploration of transformations in ‘development discourse’ that have brought questions of citizenship to centre stage. I then examine two aspects of citizenship, namely universality and quality, to argue that it is these in particular which might enable claims phrased in terms of citizenship to break through mainstream development discourses and articulate demands for deeper democracy and economic justice. Thus, through a focus on the quality of citizenship in specific contexts, it may be possible to radicalize the concept of ‘citizenship’ in development, both as an analytical category and as a means of promoting particular ethical values, different from those in the mainstream.

Citizenship, political agency and technologies of the self in Argentinean trade unions:

The paper presents findings from research on political subjectivity and citizenship with two public‐sector trade unions in Buenos Aires. I outline some of the relations between trade unionism and citizenship in Argentina and then explore the concept of ‘contención’ (‘containment’), a group‐based technology of the self which is fundamental to the construction of political agency and citizenship within the most active members of these trade unions.

4 Historical narrative, mundane political time, and revolutionary moments: coexisting temporalities in the lived experience of social movements

This paper responds to the challenge to conceptualize political activity through temporal as well as spatial perspectives, and does so by means of a discussion of the different temporalities experienced by union and social movement activists. It is based on fieldwork with activists from two public sector workers’ unions in Buenos Aires and residents and street vendors’ organizations in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. I discuss two coexisting temporalities, or social experiences of time (Munn): ‘historical time’, a sense of emplacement within a historical narrative of political action that looks back to the past and to illustrious ancestors and forwards to an imagined set of possibilities for the future; and ‘attritional time’, one of constant protest or negotiation, the continuance of the day to day of political life when there is no resolution in sight to a particular conflict or problem, coupled occasionally with a dramatization of what can become quite banal over time. Finally, I discuss a kind of event-based mediation between different temporalities, specifically revolution as a clash or meeting of attritional time and historical time, coexisting but separately experienced temporalities. This mediation involves both the revolutionary actions themselves and the practices of hailing, both contemporaneous and retrospective, which include scholarly research as well as other forms of social commentary. I suggest that this hailing might be in part enacted through a promise or assertion of discontinuity and rupture in the flow of time (Harris), even when events may not have been experienced as such at the time itself. Thus, different social experiences of time meet in a politics of time, to co-construct kairos, or revolution.

Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political

This constitutes the edited proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory held at Manchester.