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      Human rights & development in Africa: moral intrusion or empowering opportunity?

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            Abstract

            Throughout the 1990s the debates about human rights and development have increasingly converged. The article asks whether the emerging human rights‐based approach to development, honed in the period of revisionist neo‐liberalism, can deliver meaningful improvements to the African crisis. It begins by outlining the evolution of the rights‐based development agenda in order to understand how the present agenda is defined. The next section examines the theoretical underpinnings of the current rights‐based development agenda and summarises two recent reports which place such concerns at their centre. From there we examine the implementation of rights‐based procedures in Africa and assess the moral and practical implications of the rights agenda for Africa. We conclude by arguing that the emphasis on economic and developmental rights should be welcomed, because it raises the possibility of cementing the right to a decent standard of living. However, the potential exists for the rights‐based agenda to be used as a new form of conditionality which usurps national sovereignty and by handing the responsibility for defending rights to authoritarian states the process does little to challenge the power structures which may have precipitated rights abuses in the first place. Finally, the emphasis on universal rights, as defined through largely western experiences, limits the relevance of rights to local circumstances and thereby effects another form of Eurocentric violence which seeks to normalise a self‐serving social vision. Hence, only by embedding discussions of rights in the locally meaningful struggles that confront impoverished Africans and by promoting broader and direct participation which, crucially, promotes self‐determination can a rights agenda more thoroughly promote African development.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            crea20
            CREA
            Review of African Political Economy
            Review of African Political Economy
            0305-6244
            1740-1720
            June 2001
            : 28
            : 88
            : 177-196
            Affiliations
            a Department of Geography , University of Portsmouth
            b Centre for Development Studies , University of Wales , Swansea
            Article
            8704524 Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 28, No. 88, June 2001, pp. 177-196
            10.1080/03056240108704524
            b0593817-4f9a-4858-9e39-97d3f59f458d

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Page count
            Figures: 0, Tables: 0, References: 51, Pages: 20
            Categories
            Original Articles

            Sociology,Economic development,Political science,Labor & Demographic economics,Political economics,Africa

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