The Adaptation of Human Rights Norms in Local Settings: Intersections of Local and Bureaucratic Knowledge in an Israeli NGO

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological discussion on the practice of human rights. Scholars have suggested that human rights NGOs working to bring transnational notions of human rights into particular local settings must compromise these notions and adapt them to the local ones in order for them to be accepted by local communities. However, this article explains how an Israeli human rights NGO departs from the universal human rights discourse, despite the fact that its clients often insist on the recognition of their universal human rights. The dynamic process of localization and the use of local and bureaucratic knowledge serve complex interests, values, and beliefs of the actors in the organization, rather than constituting a constraint. The findings of this ethnographic study suggest a more complex interrelationship between various local agents and discourses on human rights.

The Social Construction of Moral Perceptions and Public Policies Concerning Organ Trafficking in Israel1,2

“…These organizations established international ethical norms that unequivocally condemn and ban this practice (Amahazion 2016; Budiani‐Saberi and Columb 2013). In the past two decades, a growing body of ethnographic research has examined the diffusion of international ethical norms, especially human rights, as a cultural act (Goodale 2007, 2022; Orr 2012). Cultures of human rights are co‐produced in the global–local interactions that Tsing (2005:5) conceptualizes as “friction”: “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference.” Tsing illuminates the unexpected, dynamic aspects of this global–local nexus, where local actors have a decisive impact on the result of the interaction, rather than being passive receivers.…”

Struggling between Routine and Emergency: The Legalization of Migrants and Human Rights Activism in Israel

“…Furthermore, this approach leads to the over-representation of the legal profession and the reliance on litigation as a means of social change, promoting a discourse about rights that aligns with the material and symbolic interests of the 'de-commodified' middle-class (Ziv and Shamir, 2000). The critics maintain that the professionalization and formalization of collective action limits the options for civil participation and excludes other forms of knowledge and participation, especially those tagged as having a 'radical' political orientation (Orr, 2012).…”

Vernacularization of liberal civil society by transnational Islamist NGO networks

“…In recent years, a second wave of normative change scholarship has brought up similar arguments and started to problematize the absence of norm-recipients' agency role, particularly that of non-Western local actors (Acharya 2004;Bettiza and Dionigi 2015;Boesenecker and Vinjamuri 2011;Golan and Orr 2012;Merry 2006;Orr 2012). 8 This growing body of literature, informed by agency-oriented conceptual models of historiography and anthropology, shift the focus from the norm-makers' diffusion strategies to the ways in which local entrepreneurs modify, hybridize, and adapt international norms to local cultural canons and their modalities.…”

“…By demonstrating that local actors are not passive learners of universal moral scripts, but active intermediaries who 'borrow and modify transnational norms in accordance with their preconstructed normative beliefs and practices' (Acharya 2004: 269), these models provide a much-needed corrective to the 'liberal' (Adamson 2005), 'cosmopolitan' (Acharya 2004), and 'Western-centric' (Bettiza and Dionigi 2015) lens of the earlier norm diffusion literature. Empirical studies in this vein demonstrate that local non-state actors, such as non-governmental organizations, social movement activists, and community leaders, actively reinterpret and reconstruct external idea packages to match the cultural, legal and institutional structures of the domestic environment (Goodale and Merry 2007;Gregg 2008;Levitt and Merry 2009;Merry 2006;Orr 2012;Rajaram and Zararia 2009).…”