Human Rights as a Reformist Tool: Pluralising Normative Circulations and Political Uses of the Human Rights Discourse in Morocco
Résumé
By analysing the “dialogical networks” (Leudar and Nekvapil 2002) within which human rights advocacy’s normative references are produced, we will study the ways in which human rights-related normative standards, categories and practices circulate transnationally.
In this framework, we will contextualise the use of normative references - either hard or soft law, good governance standards, moral norms -, attempting to shed light on the conflicting categorisations of principles, cases and challenges animating the debates emerging within and outside human rights advocacy networks.
We will start from the assumption that the transnational circulation of normative references has an impact on norm-creation and norm-interpretation processes at the national level (Dezalay and Garth 2002 ; Delpeuch 2006, 2008). Thus, combining international political sociology, socio-anthropology of law (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Goodale and Merry 2007) and ethnomethodology of law (Travers and Manzo 1997; Dupret 2006), we will describe the overlapping normative references and standards characterising human rights discourses and practices, as well as the politicisation and depoliticization dynamics at play within human rights networks’ advocacy work (Catusse and Vairel, 2010; Gaudin and others, 2019).
Taking Morocco as a case study, we will focus our analysis on human rights campaigns such as the one on the abolition of the death penalty as well as on security governance reforms initiatives.