Human Rights Dialogue is seeking short essays
Human Rights Dialogue, a semiannual publication of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, is seeking short essays for its Fall 2003 issue. In the coming issue, Human Rights Dialogue explores the effectiveness of the human rights framework in defining and eradicating violence against women.
Throughout societies worldwide, women are beaten, battered and killed because of their subordinate status as women. They are killed for dishonoring relatives, having sexual relations outside of marriage, choosing a partner against parental wishes, or seeking a divorce. Women face acid attacks and dowry-related murders. They incur rape and battery in the home and in civil strife. This violence not only threatens women's lives, it severely limits women's health choices, decision-making in the home and in society, participation in governance, education and overall economic and social well being. Evolving often from women's lower status in society, gender-based violence is endemic and affects woman in every corner of the globe.
Over the past decade, many mainstream human rights organizations and women's rights advocates have sought to eliminate gender-based violence with a human rights framework. Proponents of the human rights approach argue that this framework offers activists an international frame of reference within which they can place their existing agenda. The framework also offers linkages with other women's organizations and oppressed groups in their country and across the world. It serves to legitimize women's rights at the national and international level, thus offering activists constrained by their governments with a set of international instruments and tools of advocacy. The human rights approach is also useful in that it separates violence from cultural beliefs or tradition by defining harmful practices as acts of violence in violation of basic rights to life and to be free from degrading, cruel and inhumane treatment.
However, many women's rights activists have argued that the human rights framework is limiting in practice. Critics argue this universal set of rights may be too broad and all encompassing-overlooking the need for specific and identifiable women's rights to address gender-based violence. They question the notion that women can unite under a global banner of human rights, citing conflicts of interest even at the national level in regards to many issues such as class and race. Others question the efficacy of a framework that has historically focused on civil and political rights-overlooking the connections between economic and social rights and violence against women. The traditional human rights approach has also been faulted for emphasizing rights in the public sphere while neglecting to address rights in the private sphere-where women are most vulnerable to violence. Another challenge in addressing this issue with a human rights framework is the legal approach that human rights is often associated with does little to address the cultural and societal norms that propagate this violence. And often activists using this language are discredited as westernized and anti-tradition.
Submission Details:
For the past two years, Human Rights Dialogue has focused on the popular legitimacy of an international human rights framework. In the coming issue, we are interested in descriptive accounts of how activists are responding to violence against women. We are looking for critical perspectives on whether and how the human rights framework is a useful tool in addressing gender-based violence. We are also interested in how activists are defining violence against women, the strategies they are using to fight it and the challenges they are facing in doing so.
Submissions are especially welcome from (but not limited to) activists or practitioners grappling with violence against women in the context of fundamentalism, armed conflict, poverty, health crises, and democracy. Essays should seek to address one or more of the following questions by analyzing a concrete case study in the author's country or institution of which he or she has first-hand knowledge:
§ Have you found the human rights framework a useful advocacy tool for addressing violence against women? If so, what specific human rights and human rights instruments are you using in your work?
§ Are there specific ways the women's movement can push the human rights framework to be more useful in addressing this issue?
§ Does a human rights approach offer a clear definition of violence?
§ In your work, how do you label violence against women? Do you see this instead as gender-based violence or do you use another approach? Why?
§ How do you address cultural and religious norms that propagate violence against women? Is it effective to find sources within religion or tradition to eliminate violence against women? Does the human rights framework help or hinder you in accomplishing this aim?
§ Is gender violence more readily justified or accepted as a cultural norm or tradition than other human rights issues such as race discrimination? How do you address this in your work?
§ Are there different roles for local and international human rights organizations? How can they compliment each other?
§ Are you increasing your focus on international institutions, foreign governments or transnational actors and their role in causing human rights abuses? If so, how are you attempting to hold them accountable?
§ To what extent is your advocacy group working with other actors such as anti-poverty groups, labor unions, health organizations and even national governments to address problems related to violence against women?
§ Is it useful to connect violence against women to other rights issues such as democracy or to other forms of violence such as armed conflict or caste violence?
§ Does your organization find it preferable to connect violence against women to issues of children, family or motherhood? Why or Why not?
Submissions should be no more than 1200 words and written in English. We seek essays written in an engaging, informal, and testimonial style. We do not seek articles that are academic in tone or include footnotes. Contributors are encouraged to use interviews in their essays. Please see http://www.cceia.org/themes/hrd.html for previous issues of Human Rights Dialogue.
Publication in Dialogue is competitive. Authors whose submissions are selected for print must be prepared to respond to edits and queries. Submissions that exceed the stated word length will, due to space constraints, be shortened. The authors of selected essays will be asked to provide us with a biography, contact details for the organizations that they are affiliated with as well as for those mentioned in their articles, and if possible a photograph of themselves. Please also be prepared to provide photos or art to be considered for publication alongside the article. An honorarium of $100 is awarded to authors whose work is selected for publication. The deadline for submissions is July 3, 2003.
We encourage those planning to submit to contact us about their plans for their articles as soon as possible. Interested parties should direct their inquiries to: Erin Mahoney email: [email protected] or tel. 212-838-4120 or fax: 212-752-2432.

About the Carnegie Council and the Human Rights Initiative
The Carnegie Council, based in New York City, is a nonpartisan, nonsectarian organization dedicated to research and education at the intersection of ethics and international affairs. The goal of the Carnegie Council's Human Rights Initiative is to engage new and diverse voices from around the world in global dialogue and mutual learning around human rights concepts and action, with the goal of exploring how the human rights movement could be better configured intellectually and operationally to cope with the challenges of 21st century. The underlying assumption being explored is what we have termed "the human rights box": namely, that the human rights movement is constrained by a set of historical and structural circumstances that have enabled the human rights framework to gain currency among elites while limiting its advance among the broader population of the world. Participants' testimony, working knowledge, strategies, analysis and reflections are shared through the regular publication of our Human Rights Dialogue.

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