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Challenges and Opportunities of Human Rights (STG-MA-ECM-CHR)

STG-MA-ECM-CHR

Description

Over the last decades, the world is witnessing a gender backlash led by far-right activists and political forces, as well as religious factions of various creeds. The backlash has been directed at gender-related rights, that is, most notably women’s rights, but also the rights of all persons as related to sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and sexual characteristics. The primary targets of the anti-gender movement are the rights of LGBTI people and women’s reproductive rights, including contraception and abortion. Sexual education, gender studies, reproductive technologies, legislation to combat violence against women and the very concept of gender -used to explain both the power dynamics between the sexes and their ascribed social roles- have also come under attack.

The gender backlash risks destabilizing and undermining the foundation of the human rights system by denying equal rights to more than half of the world’s population and its dynamics are taking place in countries where broader processes of democratic backsliding, illiberalism and/or de-democratization can be observed. The backlash also moves hand in hand with what has been termed as ‘authoritarian international law’, which makes a ‘concerted effort to neutralize multilateral forums as vehicles for democracy promotion’, as well as constitutional authoritarianism and human rights ‘misappropriation’, a phenomenon which occurs when the language of ‘human rights serves purposes that are “exclusionary, repressive or anti-pluralistic in character, highly retrogressive, or reversing of previous commitments, and evasive of external control or accountability.’ A new actor in this counter-movement seems to be the men-led tech sector which, controlling the (increasingly unfiltered) media and monopolizing attentional power, is fast reshaping cultural and social meanings attached to gender norms and contributing to the proliferation of toxic masculinity leadership models.

This course starts by setting the conversation within the broader debate as to the relevance/irrelevance of human rights in the struggle for more just societies and to counter growing authoritarianism. It then moves to describe the state of the art concerning women´s and SOGI human rights to then analyze the global anti-gender equality movement raising the question as to whether our human rights system has the capacity to counter it and, if so, under which conditions. It ends with a skills session devoted to discussing methods for writing and delivering a critical speech or presentation.

Law Prof. Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, former EUI researcher, and member and former Chair of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls will join us to share with us an insider´s view about the potential and limits of the work of the Working Group as well as about some of the most controversial issues in the gender agenda the WG has been engaging with.  Political Science Prof. Emanuela Lombardo, from the Scuola Normale Superiore, will join us for a session on feminist institutional responses to the backlash.