452357

2012
SOC46510.1177/0038038512452357Hilhorst and JansenSociology

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Sociology
46(5) 891905
Constructing Rights and The Author(s) 2012
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Sociology of Praxis

Dorothea Hilhorst
Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Bram J Jansen
Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Abstract
Human rights entered the language and practice of humanitarian aid in the mid-1990s, and since then
they have worked in parallel, complemented or competed with traditional frameworks ordering
humanitarianism, including humanitarian principles, refugee law, and inter-agency standards. This
article positions the study of rights within a sociology of praxis. It starts from a premise that
interpretation and realisation of international norms depends on actors social negotiation. We
seek to contribute to the sociology of rights with insights from legal pluralism and to analyse
human rights as a semi-autonomous field in a multiplicity of normative frameworks. Based on
cumulative research into humanitarian aid in disaster response, refugee care and protracted
crises, the article explores how humanitarian agencies evoke different normative frameworks to
legitimate their presence and programmes. How aid is shaped through the rights speak of aid
workers and recipients alike is illuminated by cases of programmes promoting womens rights
against sexual abuse from Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Keywords
human rights, humanitarian action, humanitarian arena, humanitarian principles, humanitarian
standards, legal pluralism, refugee law

Introduction
This article explores how actors in the humanitarian community evoke different norma-
tive frameworks, including the frameworks of human rights, to define humanitarian

Corresponding author:
Dorothea Hilhorst, Disaster Studies, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Email: thea.hilhorst@wur.nl

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892 Sociology 46(5)

crises, shape humanitarian action, and negotiate power relations. Humanitarian aid is
primarily constituted by life-saving relief activities in cases of conflict, disaster or starva-
tion. In the course of time, the label of humanitarian aid has also come to be used for
broader sets of services provided to refugees and disaster- or conflict-affected people,
including education and a range of services associated with development. The agencies
delivering these services identify themselves as humanitarian and their activities are
funded through humanitarian budgets. With the broadening of humanitarian aid, its nor-
mative underpinning has also widened. Whereas humanitarian workers originally found
legitimation and guidance for their work in the humanitarian principles of neutrality and
impartiality that were derived from international humanitarian law and refugee law,
since the 1990s they increasingly adopt rights-based frameworks that are grounded in
human rights declarations and conventions.
Much literature on rights treats the international legal instruments as a singular body.
However, although they are generated from similar western interests and philosophical
ideas and appear compatible, their multiplicity nonetheless creates tension and provides
room for manoeuvre in practice. The fact that humanitarian aid is governed by multiple
normative frameworks allows us to explore how international aid workers and their
recipients as major proponents of globalised social relations use normative frame-
works such as human rights, the humanitarian principles and other standards to negotiate
their identity, roles, status and power positions.
We position ourselves in the sociology of rights (Anleu, 1999; Hynes et al., 2010;
Morris, 2010; Sen, 2004; Sjoberg et al., 2001; Somers and Roberts, 2008; Turner, 1993)
that builds on the basic premise that most internationally designed bodies of rights are
not enforceable in a legal sense there is no body to investigate and impose legal sanc-
tion in cases of breaches of refugee law and therefore only become alive through
interpretation and realisation in everyday practice. There is an emerging literature on
how human rights are interpreted locally where they rarely find outright rejection or
adoption, but are co-opted or blend into local norms and values (Archibald and Richards,
2002). In a similar vein, we will unravel the dynamics by which actors in the humanitar-
ian arena selectively use human rights and other frameworks, to blend them with their
own values, ideologies and interests. As we will argue, the presence of multiple orders
results in an ambiguous space that provides humanitarian actors with room for manoeuvre.
They use these frames to negotiate and justify their interventions in crisis areas.
Our focus is on humanitarian agencies, the staff and clients of these agencies, and
their surrounding networks. There are currently thousands of agencies that self-identify
as humanitarian and together they employ between an estimated 136,000 and 242,000
humanitarian workers (Borton, 2009). Their habitat is mainly formed by what Mark
Duffield (2001) labels the borderlands of western domination. Following discussions
and actions of humanitarian actors is therefore invaluable in informing the creation and
working of international normative orders.
One of the interesting dimensions of practices around international normative orders,
in our view, is their implication for the identities and roles of humanitarian agencies. We
currently witness a shifting notion in international rights discourse on the question of
who constitutes the duty-bearers that have a responsibility in ensuring or protecting
these rights. While original human rights thinking addressed the nation-state as the

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Hilhorst and Jansen 893

primary or sole duty-bearer, human rights practice has become both the product, and one
of the main vehicles, in processes that resituate the nation-state in terms of its powers and
duties. Peoples rights increasingly have become the direct concern of international bod-
ies over the sovereignty of states (Chandler, 2003: 332). At the same time, we find
increasing reference to non-state entities including multinational corporations and NGOs
as responsible for upholding human rights. Gready and Ensor (2005: 6) refer to this as a
pattern of rights: a system of claim-duty relationships spanning subjects from interna-
tional to local to household levels. This means that we must examine not only state
power but also the power of multinational corporations and large-scale transnational
organisations (and even NGOs themselves) (Sjoberg et al., 2001: 43). Humanitarian
NGOs, just like states, are designed to protect people and advocate the rights of their
constituency but may transform, in practice, into institutions that use their power to
breach these rights. This has the important sociological implication that negotiations
over rights in the humanitarian arena about claims and entitlements, turn equally into
negotiations over identities, social positions, roles and power. They can implicitly or
explicitly be about the legitimation of agencies as appropriate service providers, the
legitimation of their clients as deserving aid recipients, the access and protection required
by NGOs to serve people, and the abuse of power by humanitarian institutions.
In the next section of the article we elaborate the theoretical framework we use for our
inquiry into the construction of rights and wrongs in humanitarian action. We then elabo-
rate the different international normative frameworks that pertain to humanitarian action
and their implications for the roles of humanitarian agencies.
A further section discusses the Afghanistan and Iraq crises in which the encounter
between human rights and international humanitarian law became highly politicised.
Subsequent sections analyse the use of rights languages outside the global hotspots
where humanitarian action is shaped in the routines of everyday practice. We first elabo-
rate some of the mechanisms by which humanitarian workers navigate the normative
multiplicity in which they operate and then analyse how humanitarian agencies increas-
ingly use human rights to frame their presence and programmes. We end with a section
on how the responses of local people to projects protecting women from sexual abuse
affect humanitarian action.

Methodology
This article builds on cumulative research into humanitarian action in the aftermath of
natural disaster, during conflict and in refugee settings. Dorothea Hilhorst has done
extensive research in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Angola, Ethiopia, Rwanda and the
DRC. Bram Jansen did an 18-month ethnographic study in Kakuma refugee camp in
Kenya in 2005/6 and is currently studying humanitarian governance in South Sudan.
Both authors have been extensively engaged in humanitarian debate in the Netherlands
and internationally. Most of the research for this article is based on ethnography in which
everyday humanitarian practice is observed to detect the contradictions between the dis-
cursive claims of actors and the multiple realities of everyday life. Throughout many
periods of fieldwork, supported by literature study and on-going debates, the authors
found that negotiations over rights increasingly dominate humanitarian encounters. Aid

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894 Sociology 46(5)

recipients express their needs in terms of human rights, and humanitarians invoke human
rights in their representations to and communication with beneficiaries, donors and local
governments. This article has come about through retrospective inquiry into these accu-
mulated researches and experiences; the latter part is based on current research in South
Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Social Negotiation of a Plurality of Rights in

Humanitarian Arenas
Without negating the importance of the legal properties of international instruments, we
view them primarily as constituting social claims. It is not the universal possession of
rights that counts, but their always selective enactment through uneasy mixes of the
chicanery of international politics, the struggles of social movements and the commit-
ment of rights advocates. The socially constructed nature of rights argues for examining
the way in which specific cultural and historical conditions shape the emergence of rights
claims or rights discourse (Anleu, 1999: 205). As rights gain meaning in specific condi-
tions, the production and materialisation of rights need to be studied in the everyday
practices where they acquire meaning.
We view humanitarian action as an arena where actors socially negotiate the out-
comes of aid (Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010; Hilhorst and Serrano, 2010). Note that social
negotiation encompasses any kind of strategy, including coercive violence, written
statements, formal interactions, schemes deployed in the shadows of official processes
and gossiping or rumour. The realities and outcomes of humanitarian action depend on
how actors along and around the aid chain donor representatives, headquarters, field
staff, aid recipients and surrounding actors interpret the context, the needs, their own
role and each other. The sociology of everyday practice breaks through a binary that
separates principles and policy from implementation and practice. It observes how prin-
ciples and policies get translated, altered, co-opted or circumvented in everyday practice.
This perspective derives from the structuration theory of Giddens (1984) about how
routinised action constitutes institutionalisation and an understanding of the agency of
actors in and around humanitarian arenas to act upon their interpretation of the principles
and implementing conditions of humanitarian aid (Long, 1992, 2001).
Language and especially its normative elements plays an important role in this.
Rights languages are discourses that contain certain ways of understanding society,
including its organisation and the distribution of power (Foucault, 1978). In a humanitar-
ian arena, notions like the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality and the
body of human rights gain or lose meaning through interactions of humanitarians and
their surrounding stakeholders. Norms only become real through the ways in which ser-
vice providers and surrounding actors interpret them and use them in their everyday
practice.
The social life of rights (Wilson, 1997) cannot be reduced to a single ordering prin-
ciple, such as cultural prepositioning or geopolitical interests. This can be illustrated by
the Stop Genocide Now movement for Darfur, where the imaging of conflict and disas-
ter by the media played a large role in labelling this crisis. Mamdani (2009) describes
how media imagery of militias on horseback who attacked villages of innocent farmers

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Hilhorst and Jansen 895

engendered a movement which turned Darfur into an important domestic issue in the
USA. The images were devoid of references to specific times and locations, and essen-
tialised the conflict to an evil Arab government versus its black people. A powerful
human rights advocacy movement in the USA became a protagonist of violent interven-
tion in Darfur. Darfur became subject to a diffuse, popular and domestic appropriation of
human rights issues. The consequences for humanitarian action were nonetheless very
real. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in 2009 for President
Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. In
retaliation, the Sudanese government expelled 13 humanitarian organisations from
Darfur.
Redhead and Turnbull argue for the importance of studying human rights practition-
ers, to seek out how they engage with human rights, how they employ its terminology
and how these actions redefine human rights itself (2011: 177). The model of a humani-
tarian arena concurs with this position and adds to it by also according importance to aid
recipients as social actors. Whereas aid recipients often disappear from conventional
analysis as an amorphous body of victims, we consider their constituent role in shaping
the conditions and practices of aid. Social negotiation between aid providers and recipi-
ents implies an explicit or implicit negotiation of normative orders.
To enable our analysis of interfacing normative orders, we draw on the tradition of
legal pluralism, which refers to the presence in a social field of more than one legal
order (Griffiths, 1986: 1). Legal pluralism originates from studies of the interface
between modern law and traditional or customary law in colonial and post-colonial soci-
eties. It distances itself from legal centralism, where law is uniformly applied state law
administered by a single set of state institutions. Instead, legal pluralism speaks of semi-
autonomous fields. This concept, introduced by Sally Falk Moore, denotes a field that
can generate rules and induce compliance to them (in Griffiths, 1986: 29). Semi-
autonomous fields are interdependent: they generate rules yet are also set into a larger
social matrix which can, and does, affect and invade it (1986: 29). A consequence of
legal pluralism is that the same situation and the same people are subject to more than
one legal order. Each of these is inscribed into the status of different persons and institu-
tions. The ways in which each of these becomes relevant in specific situations can only
be established empirically (Von Benda-Beckmann, 2002: 66).
The notion of the semi-autonomous field is highly appropriate for our interest in the
interfaces between different international normative frameworks. Although the frame-
works we introduce originate from similar cultural and philosophical western pedigrees,
they constitute semi-autonomous fields that each generate their own rules and have
developed different sets of mechanisms, constituencies and jurisprudence to induce
compliance. From the point of view of a distant spectator, they all look the same, but
close to the ground one perceives differences in legitimation, operation and effects.
Human Rights Watch and Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF) may both be subsumed under
the generalised label of NGO, yet in the field they often clash in terms of their interpre-
tation of situations and chosen strategies to act on behalf of the same vulnerable
population.
The grand claim of an actor-oriented, legal pluralist approach is that the ways in
which actors negotiate different normative frameworks in everyday practice accumulate

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896 Sociology 46(5)

into a renewed understanding of the content and relative importance of these frameworks
(Falk Moore, 2001:107). At the same time, we are aware that, in the life-worlds of
humanitarian actors, the multiplicity of normative orders presents itself as a context to be
confused by, to cope with, to suffer from or to take advantage of. The claim of this article
is therefore more modest. We want to inquire into the working of these multiple orders
to highlight the presence of ambiguity and the space this allows for manoeuvring and
negotiation (Von Benda-Beckmann and Pirie, 2007: 12). As we will show, at some point
the ambiguity becomes such that normative frames lose their ordering or prescriptive
character and become tools for humanitarians to frame whichever intervention they
deem relevant.

Two Bodies of Law and a Bundle of Norms

International humanitarian law (IHL) and refugee law are primarily addressing warring
parties and governments, yet also govern humanitarian action and grant humanitarian
agencies the right to access and assist victims. The International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) has a special status in IHL, with the important implication that signatory
parties must protect the humanitarian space that ICRC needs to access people in need. To
live up to its designated role, the ICRC has formulated four basic principles that guide
humanitarian action: humanity (the desire to prevent and alleviate human suffering
wherever it may be found); impartiality or the principle of non-discrimination; neutral-
ity; and independence (Leader, 2000). These four principles continue to be associated
with humanitarian aid. They are recognised in important UN resolutions and policies of
humanitarian donor states. As for ICRC under humanitarian law, the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a special mandate in refugee law. The
organisation is not directly responsible for refugees, but must guard the fulfilment of the
rights of refugees by states, advocating and lobbying governments to comply with their
responsibilities. Since the 1980s, and specifically since the end of the Cold War, UNHCR
has increasingly started to implement assistance programmes, outside its task as a guard-
ian of refugee rights (Kourula, 1997; Loescher, 2003).
ICRC and UNHCR thus have designated roles. They work according to humanitarian
principles, and may themselves be seen as right-holders in the sense that they can com-
mand state protection. Signatory states to IHL and refugee law are obliged to safeguard
the access of ICRC and UNHCR and protect humanitarian workers from assault so that
they can follow their humanitarian principles without hindrance. There are, however,
many more agencies engaged in humanitarian work. Mdecins Sans Frontires was
formed in 1971 in the aftermath of the Biafra crises. A number of UN agencies, including
WFP, UNICEF and FAO, were mandated to take on aspects of humanitarian assistance,
while numerous charity and development agencies have expanded their domains to
incorporate humanitarian action. In the context of the big African famines of the 1980s,
humanitarian agencies multiplied to number into the hundreds, expanding to thousands
in the post-Cold War era. Discussions about the unruly nature of aid and concerns about
the political abuse of aid during the 1991 US military intervention in Somalia led to the
initiating of a Code of Conduct for Disaster Relief Situations (Walker, 2005). The Code
makes reference to the classical humanitarian principles along with modern principles

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Hilhorst and Jansen 897

derived from the development aid sector: accountability, partnership, participation and
sustainability.
Soon after, the Code was followed by the Sphere Standards1 initiative which defines
minimum standards to which disaster-affected people are entitled. The Sphere Standards,
and the numerous inter-agency norms that have followed since,2 have brought about a
new positioning of humanitarian agencies vis-a-vis rights. Whereas humanitarian assis-
tance sets out as an expression of the desire to save lives, a voluntary gesture, humanitar-
ians are increasingly called upon to account for the professional delivery of services,
turning them into duty-bearers. Because agencies raise funds on behalf of people in need,
they can be held to account to deliver relief (Hilhorst, 2002).
More than a set of internal procedures, these norms have become referents for donors
and international organisations in the regulation of aid. Humanitarian funding, for exam-
ple, is increasingly becoming conditional upon adherence to the NGO Code of Conduct
or the Sphere Standards, which elevates the status of these norms, in our view, to some-
thing akin to international customary law (Hilhorst, 2005).
The Code of Conduct and Sphere Standards apply to all agencies that sign up to them,
enabling an ever larger array of organisations that identify themselves as humanitarian
and make a claim to protected access to crisis-affected people in need. They also signal
a broadening of the normative base of humanitarianism where the needs-based principles
are complemented with principles and standards that are easily translated into rights-
based approaches. The introduction of rights-based language alters the conception of
recipients of aid, away from vulnerable and needy victims to rights-holders entitled to a
decent level of services. Many agencies engaged in direct service delivery now profess
the importance of rights-based approaches. While this can be interpreted as an evolution
of norms, it can also be viewed as the de-centring or even dismantling of the classic
principles (Stockton, 2003).

The Introduction of Human Rights in Humanitarianism

Human rights and international humanitarian law are different frameworks that both
have a role in global governance, but until well into the 1990s there was little interpen-
etration. After the end of the Cold War, humanitarian assistance started receiving more
critical attention and concerns were raised about the effect of humanitarian action on
peoples human rights in the context of national statesociety relations. Alex de Waal, for
example, posited in Famine Crimes (1997) that humanitarian agencies effectively ena-
bled the violation of human rights by governments. In his analysis, the availability of
international assistance contributed to the de-politicisation of governments neglect of
human rights, with the consequence that people did not hold their governments account-
able for their misdeeds. Similar arguments have been made in the course of time with
regard to humanitarians role in the warehousing of refugees in camps, which legiti-
mises the states seclusion of refugees, often with severe limitations on basic human
rights (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, 2005).
In the course of the 1990s, rights-based concepts and instruments like human security
and the Responsibility to Protect norm gave the international community increasing lee-
way to act for the protection of people suffering from violence. Human rights also entered

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898 Sociology 46(5)

the vocabulary of humanitarian agencies. In the first years, this went by without much
controversy (Macrae and Leader, 2000). If anything, rights activists lamented the lack of
international military engagement on account of human rights, most notably during the
Rwanda genocide. A convergence of human rights and humanitarian action seemed
increasingly acceptable, where humanitarian agencies were prepared to engage in rights-
based peace-building to contribute to resolving crises instead of only bringing comfort to
the victims.
The happy coalition between human rights and IHL was short lived and changed dra-
matically with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following the 2001 attack on the World
Trade Center in New York. Since the start of the global war on terror, the other face
of human rights (Morris, 2010) as an opportunity for western powers to intervene in the
Third World under the auspices of the United Nations (Turner, 1993: 499) resurfaced in
more raw and naked forms. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were partly legitimated
with human rights arguments, to protect women from Taliban oppression and Iraqi peo-
ple from Saddams atrocities. These wars triggered intense debate among humanitarian
NGOs. In the absence of a UN Security Council mandate, they were considered by many
to be breaching international humanitarian law. This had vast consequences for the
humanitarians, whose headquarters are based in these countries and whose financial sur-
vival in most cases depends on their governments. They were associated with the war,
which gravely affected their reputation and hence their security on the ground. The
bombing of the UN office and the ICRC office in Baghdad, in August and October 2003
respectively, were read by many as a signal that people in war-affected countries per-
ceived humanitarians as part of the politics of war.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq engaged humanitarians intensely and the meaning
of their principles for once were not taken for granted but became essential to their iden-
tity and continuation. A number of humanitarian agencies and observers advocated a
return to the fundamental principles of neutrality and impartiality. Other agencies were
more lenient in accepting their role in advancing western values or reasoned that the
allied forces were actually occupying powers and hence responsible for the well-being of
the populations involved. These arguments legitimated their acceptance of funding for
relief and reconstruction programmes (De Torrente, 2004; Donini et al., 2004; Slim,
2004). At no moment did a unified voice appear and NGOs of different vocation simply
went their own way, with some withdrawing from the areas and many others taking on
tendered projects in the war-affected areas. The intense debates over human rights and
humanitarianism have subsided in the course of the decade, yet this episode shows how
they may indeed compete in specific times and conditions.

Humanitarian Workers and the Negotiation of Multiple

Orders
While at times rights discourse is openly contested, subtle but equally meaningful chal-
lenges may result, almost unnoticed, from everyday practice (Hilhorst, 2001). The mul-
tiple international frameworks present themselves to humanitarian workers primarily as
context, an often confusing reality they have to deal with. This does not mean that prin-
ciples are unimportant for humanitarians. Principles, rights and standards carry

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Hilhorst and Jansen 899

importance beyond their essence as social claims on behalf of vulnerable populations.

They help to interpret situations, in a similar way to that referred to by Clifford Geertz as
law as one way of imagining the real (1983). It has been observed that humanitarians
use their principles to add higher meaning to otherwise tedious and tense work (Walkup,
1997). Principles are also identity markers that help humanitarians to feel distinct com-
pared to other actors engaging in humanitarian crises (Rokebach, 1973: 159), and they
work as glue, binding members of an organisation together (Barnard and Walker, 1994:
57). These added meanings of principles may be more important than their function in
prescribing humanitarian action. The latter may become secondary or even non-existent
in everyday practice.
Principles find translation in decision-making patterns in the field teams of humani-
tarian organisations. Due to the intense experience of humanitarian action, far removed
from normal lives, relatives and friends, the team frequently forms the only social net-
work of aid workers and starts to resemble what Goffman (1961) called closed com-
munities. When Hilhorst and Schmiemann (2002) asked former MSF volunteers how
they dealt with the multitude of principles in practice, two patterns evolved of ways in
which humanitarian field teams circumvent policies and principles when they consider
these inappropriate. In the first place, aid workers referred to the pragmatic requirements
of the situation: they weighed the need to get the job done against the harm they antici-
pated that breaching of principles would entail. In this way they sometimes decoded,
bent or broke rules; for instance by allowing military personnel to join a ride to an air-
port, knowing full well that offending them and leaving them at the side of the road
would result in endless bureaucratic delays later. The other way in which volunteers
negotiated principles was by justifying their actions by referring to higher or parallel
principles. For instance, while witnessing an unhygienic and dangerous female circumci-
sion, an aid worker decided to provide clean tools, despite the neutrality-oriented hands
off circumcision policy of the organisation. She justified this with reference to her medi-
cal ethics, which she placed above the humanitarian principles.
The ways in which humanitarians selectively draw on the different bodies of law,
norms and standards happens sometimes heatedly and explicitly as detailed above for the
cases of Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet it also happens unnoticed, implicitly and routinely in
everyday humanitarian action. In the following sections, we describe the ways in which
humanitarian agencies have come to incorporate human rights, and then how local peo-
ple affect the dynamics of current gender programmes in humanitarian action.

Humanitarian Agencies and Human Rights

Many agencies, NGOs and the UN involved in the provision of humanitarian aid have,
over the last two decades, adopted a rights-based approach in the story they tell about
themselves. The twinning of humanitarianism and human rights has become most
explicit in the case of UNHCR. This agencys humanitarian identity is enshrined in refu-
gee law, yet it has explicitly adopted a rights-based approach. This has mainly found
expression in education and advocacy programmes (Bakewell, 2003). Ironically, crisis-
affected people and encamped refugees who live in situations where their rights are
highly restricted are made aware of their rights by agencies that cannot bring about the

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900 Sociology 46(5)

realisations of these rights, leading to increased frustration on the part of the refugees
(De Waal, 2010; Muggah, 2005). UNHCR and international NGOs act as advocates of
human rights and educate refugees about their rights to travel, work and engage in politi-
cal association. These same actors, however, act as the principal authorities in the camps,
where they enact rules and regulations that severely restrict these rights in practice.
In post-independence South Sudan we find a different situation. The presence of hun-
dreds of organisations in the new country, where the role of the humanitarian agencies in
the new country is less clearly defined, leads to what Wilson (in Miller, 2010: 920) refers
to as the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Human rights are a major frame of ref-
erence for agencies to legitimate their presence and define their role vis-a-vis the govern-
ment. Miller (2010) views the adoption of human rights in development programmes not
as a rights-based approach, but as a rights-framed approach. NGO programmes, in this
view, are not driven by their normative understanding of rights, but on the contrary, their
rights speak is driven by their policy and used to legitimate their action (2010: 924).
Consider, for example, the NGO with the name Right to Play. Its name suggests that
playing is a right, while the agency operates in South Sudan where it educates beneficiar-
ies on legally existing rights. Miller concludes that rights-based approaches in develop-
ment are understood to represent a mantle, slogan or metaphor that covers a
variety of organisations, programmes, commitments, set of values, trends,
and initiatives in development practice (2010: 918). Humanitarian principles can be
used in similar ways. As researchers, we frequently encounter NGOs hiding behind the
principle of independence in order to withhold information or to refuse to discuss their
policies.
In the humanitarian arena of South Sudan, the smaller NGOs especially depend for
their access and room for manoeuvre on local power-holders. Negotiations are part of the
aid game and shifting between different sets of rights and frameworks is one way of
doing this. Missionaries of evangelical organisations claim they are working on human
rights, and in addition adopt a humanitarian veneer. Local authorities reverse the human
rights arguments to steer programmes in desired directions. Humanitarian workers in
South Sudan often complain in interviews how government officials demand that they
provide services in places determined by the authorities, and the role of duty-bearer is
played out between authorities and NGOs. The language of human rights is thus used to
legitimate aid and to negotiate the roles and responsibilities of agencies leading to highly
negotiated settlements on the ground.

Human Rights and Gender at the Aid Encounter

One of the most striking observations we have made in recent years is the rapid adoption
of rights language among aid recipients in different contexts. Recipients of aid increas-
ingly become what Sally Engle Merry (2003) calls rights-defined selves, to denote how
people start to define themselves and their problems in terms of human rights. We like to
illustrate this with two cases where humanitarian agencies take up the promotion of
womens rights by protecting women against sexual abuse. Triggered by the high preva-
lence of sexual violence during conflict, aid agencies increasingly take up gender issues
as part of their rights-based approaches. Gender programmes of NGOs may generate

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Hilhorst and Jansen 901

resistance among men and women who feel threatened or disrespected. In South Sudan,
we interviewed NGOs working on the prevention of sexual violence, whose expatriate
staff never went to the field because the programme caused resistance among men, which
resulted in threats to their security. While local staff went out to educate the communi-
ties, the managers of the programme stayed inside their protected compounds.
In the case of Kakuma refugee camp, after the sensitisation that domestic violence is
against womens rights, women massively started to claim resettlement on the grounds
of sexual abuse. After the well-known resettlement of the so-called Lost Boys from
Sudan, the USA and other countries have welcomed resettlement from Kenya for refu-
gees that are particularly vulnerable. With their womens rights education, agencies pro-
duced a category of vulnerability that made abused women eligible for resettlement.
Once this became known, women started to find ways to claim sexual abuse in order to
get access to resettlement. Resettlement is highly desired among refugees and competi-
tion to become eligible for resettlement is fierce. Even though the staff were convinced
that almost all cases were fictitious, they felt powerless to stop this practice. They are
just creating insecurity, one informant said. In some cases, the husband of the violated
wife, who was accused of sexual abuse, later successfully applied for resettlement to join
his wife on the grounds of family reunification (Jansen, 2011).
In the DRC, the shocking reports of sexual atrocities as a routine of war have led to
numerous programmes to provide services to victims and bring sexual abuse cases to
court. These programmes have many unintended side-effects. Reproductive health has
become mainly available to rape victims, leaving women with health problems as a result
of child delivery little choice but to present themselves at a rape clinic. A surgeon of such
a clinic reported that only one out of 350 operations of 2011 was related to rape, but as
he rightly said: What should I do, it hurts me to see that those women suffer, sometimes
already for over 20 years. Should I send them away because they were not raped?
(Douma and Hilhorst, 2012: 43). Legislation and court cases that have been heavily
invested in by the international community in order to combat war-related sexual abuse
are now often used by parents to sue men not necessarily the father to pay for the
upbringing of children born from pregnancies of unmarried daughters. A woman in
Bukavu in South Kivu stated: In our neighbourhood, nearly all pregnancies of unmar-
ried girls are sooner or later transformed into a sexual violence case (2012: 53). The
numbers of people seeking services or financial compensation by acting as victims of
sexual abuse adds to the statistics of rape victims in DRC. Ironically, this legitimates, in
turn, further programmes on sexual violence.
The attention to gender shows how the selection of specific rights-based approaches
implies changes in identity and roles of involved actors. Increasingly, we see human
rights work in refugee camps and humanitarian crises focus on those rights that are pri-
marily breached in private, by husbands or other males. The effect is that rights are
relocated away from international duty-bearers, and from the agencies as proxy authori-
ties, towards individual men as violators of womens rights. As our examples illustrate,
gender issues cast dilemmas in rights-based approaches into sharp relief as the (western)
human rights standards in these cases invade cultural domains. The use of these stand-
ards in programmes evokes strong responses from local people and demonstrates clearly
the role of aid recipients in shaping humanitarian realities.

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902 Sociology 46(5)

Conclusion
Human rights-speak has rapidly turned into one of the constituent elements of humani-
tarian action. Humanitarian crises are framed with reference to rights. Humanitarians and
their clients find self- and ascribed identities through normative labels and choices of
activities and target-groups are justified with references to specific rights and categories
of vulnerability and victimhood.
As our vignettes show, human rights languages get appropriated by all parties con-
cerned with humanitarian action: media, international political actors, UN agencies, the
Red Cross movement, NGOs, local authorities, religious groups and affected popula-
tions. In their everyday evocations, rights have different faces. Rights can stand for a
genuine desire to protect, or a just claim to protection. They can also stand for different
kinds of political use ranging from geopolitical master games, to mundane organisational
politicking on the part of agencies looking for a greater piece of the donor-funds pie, or
a woman seeking money to raise her child. In a lot of cases, claims to assert, protect or
promote human rights have the simple commercial subtext: give me your money. More
often than not, the different faces of rights are entangled; for example, when a humanitar-
ian bends the norms to be better able to perform an act of assistance, or when seeking
justice for a serious breach of rights evolves into a scheme to make money for real and
unreal victims of rights abuse.
The cumulative observations this article is based on lead us to the conclusion that the
working of human rights eludes a single grand theory of their meaning. For us, the soci-
ology of rights is primarily a sociology of praxis. Humanitarian action is important in the
making of human rights and in the competing frames of global governance. The mecha-
nisms by which this happens involve at times explicit and dramatic clashes of different
orders, as during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Yet, more significantly, these mecha-
nisms are found in the everyday routinised encounters between aid givers and recipients
in humanitarian crises within and outside of the global spotlights. Much more independ-
ent empirical research is required to unravel the micro-elements of rights and power in
the expanding global roles of humanitarian action.
Our article provides several pointers that can help sociologists make sense of the
labyrinths of rights and wrongs in humanitarian action. Leaning on insights from the
field of legal pluralism, we suggest viewing the different international normative
frameworks, including humanitarian principles, refugee law and inter-agency codes
and standards as semi-autonomous fields where each of these frameworks is embodied
in different sets of institutions and practices. This allows us to follow empirically how
actors in and around humanitarianism negotiate norms and find room for manoeuvre in
their ambiguity.
We further point to the crucial importance of negotiating normative frameworks for
the identity and legitimation of different actors. While a number of humanitarian agen-
cies find legitimation in international humanitarian law and refugee law, we find that an
increasing number of agencies frame their identities and programmes in a language of
human rights to claim their right to be there and intervene in other peoples crises. This
brings the study of normative frameworks to the heart of the sociological domain of
studying organisation, status, roles and power.

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Hilhorst and Jansen 903

Negotiating different normative frameworks allows actors to navigate their position vis-
a-vis rights. Gready and Ensor (2005) refer to the current human rights culture as a pattern
of rights: a system of claim-duty relationships spanning subjects from international to local
to household levels. Humanitarian agencies make themselves right-holders when they call
on international humanitarian law to claim protection and access to crises-affected popula-
tions. In their protection activities, they promote and advocate peoples rights vis-a-vis dif-
ferent duty-bearers, ranging from international actors to a current upsurge of interest in
addressing rights at the interpersonal level of gender relations under the humanitarianism
label. While humanitarians are quick to claim their roles as right-holders and advocates, it is
time for them to make more sense of their roles as duty-bearers and seek to reflect and act
on the intended and unintended consequences of their work for human rights.

Funding
These researches are financed through the Netherlands WOTRO Science for Development.

Notes
1 http://www.sphereproject.org/
2 http://www.humanitarianinfo.org/iasc/

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Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at Wageningen

University. Her research concerns the aidnography of humanitarian crises and fragile
states. Her publications focus on the everyday practices of humanitarian aid, disaster risk
reduction, climate change adaptation, reconstruction and peace building. She coordinates
research programmes in Angola, DRC, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique and
Uganda. Thea Hilhorst completed her dissertation on a Philippine development NGO and
its surrounding networks, clientele and donors (The Real World of NGOs. Discourses,
Diversity and Development, Zedbooks, 2003). http://www.disasterstudies.wur.nl
Bram J Jansen is an anthropologist specialising in refugee, conflict and humanitarian
studies. He has done extensive field research in East and the Horn of Africa in the past
10 years. In 2011 he obtained his PhD, entitled The accidental city: violence, economy
and humanitarianism in Kakuma refugee camp. Bram Jansen is currently working on a
post doc research focusing on humanitarian decision-making processes in relation to
insecurity in South Sudan. He is affiliated to Wageningen University as Assistant
Professor of Disaster Studies.

Date submitted August 2011

Date accepted May 2012

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