Abstract
In this article we focus on human rights brokerage in Nepal and Sri Lanka – two countries undergoing different kinds of post-war crises, which opened spaces and demands for brokers. We zoom in on the lives of two individuals who became human rights brokers in these turbulent moments of change, and explore their positionalities, roles and effects as brokers. We seek to move beyond simplistic portrayals of such brokers as a dissembling, self-interested and professionalized class of gatekeepers, and instead focus on the brokers’ narratives, understandings, and everyday practices. Based on detailed life history research, this article reveals a more complex picture of brokerage during crisis. It is argued that we need to take seriously the accounts of human rights brokers, how they understand their own positionality, actions and impacts on society. We focus on the complex temporalities surrounding human rights brokerage in post war contexts; how brokers mediate between a traumatic past (linked to human rights abuses and justice denied) and a desired future (involving restitution, access to rights and justice) in the context of an unstable present marked by violence, churning politics, and institutional inertia. Human rights brokers’ ability to navigate these contested understandings of time is shaped by their own past histories and their current positionalities. Whilst being cautious not to generalize from the lives of two human rights brokers, our work offers a corrective to accounts of brokerage as a value-free, transactional activity; instead, we reveal how, for these brokers at least, ethics, values and political beliefs played an important role in driving their actions, even though declared goals were rarely met in practice.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Cultural Studies |
Early online date | 23 Jan 2025 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 23 Jan 2025 |
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all the respondents who gave up their time to participate in this research. A wider team of researchers participated in the fieldwork and we would like to acknowledge: In Nepal, researchers at Martin Chautari: Sujeet Karn, Madhusudan Subedi, Bhaskar Gautam, Kalpana Jha, Bhawana Oli, Sangita Thebe Limbu, Pratyoush Onta, Ankalal Chalaune, Asmita Khanal and, Indu Chaudhari. In Sri Lanka, researchers from the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA): Vagisha Gunasekera, Nayana Godamunne, and Aftab Lal. We are also indebted to Shahul Hasbullah and Vijay Nagaraj, who both played a key role in the research and are sorely missed by us all. International Alert, under the direction of Markus Mayer were also a partner in this research and helped facilitate conversations with policy makers and academics in Colombo and Kathmandu. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sri Lanka Roundtable in Utrecht, May 2023 and we are grateful to our fellow panellists and audience members for feedback received. We are grateful to Birgit Bräuchler, Nadeeka Arambewela-Colley, and Kathrin Knodel (the special issue editors), an anonymous reviewer, as well as to Jayanthi Lingham, Farah Mihlar, and Hasanah Cegu Isadeen, all of whom provided detailed comments on this paper. All mistakes are our own.Funding
This work was supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/P008216/1]; Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/M011046/1].
Keywords
- Brokerage
- Nepal
- Sri Lanka
- brokers
- human rights
- temporalities
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Cultural Studies
- Anthropology
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- General Social Sciences