Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p14539"

Human rights have become a hegemonic discourse, taking various forms across the world. They take shape in both legal and bureaucratic processes, having an impact on national legislation and institutions across the globe. They also appear in contexts outside of the law or human rights institutions, in the media, in everyday speech, in the work of non-governmental organizations or even companies. Simultaneously, however, anthropologists have noticed a significant decline in human rights in political contexts, in comparison to previous decades. The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding of the mechanisms and processes that currently are maintaining the hegemony of the discourse. This thesis approaches the human rights discourse through three research questions. Firstly, how do European youth organizations maintain the hegemony of the human rights discourse as they engage with human rights mechanisms? Secondly, how do young people involved in youth organizations make human rights claims? Thirdly, in what position does the use of the human rights discourse put the young people in regards to the hegemonic discourse? The focus is on finding out to what extent the young people are shaping the hegemonic discourse and to what degree they are ruled by it. The research has been conducted through participant observation and interviews, that have been conducted between September 2018 and March 2019, within the context of a Brussels-based umbrella organization of European youth organizations. The primary data consists of notes from participant observation of meetings and work of a working group that focuses on youth rights, as well as 11 semi-structured interviews and some informal interactions, as well as some NGO reports. This is supported by secondary data, namely, policy papers and publications on youth rights, and a UN report and resolutions on youth and human rights. The data has been analyzed through discourse analysis. Making human rights claims entails defining issues, struggles or debates as human rights violations. In the case of the studied youth rights discourse, a variety of societal challenges that young people are facing were identified as human rights violations. Furthermore, making human rights claims requires a certain grasp of the UN register. This means knowing the practices and language required to be able to address issues through the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The studied working group has an essential role in the process of language socialization. Through their engagement with the UPR, the youth representatives are learning to grasp the UN register in appropriate ways. For the involved youth organizations, both the choice of topics as well as phrasing of UPR submissions and recommendations are shaped by previous recommendations made by states to each other, as well as UPR submissions that have been made earlier in the process by other youth organizations. This contributes to recreating and maintaining the hegemony of the human rights discourse. When struggles are defined as human rights violations and addressed through the UPR, the struggles are scaled. Firstly, they are defined as national human rights issues through the UPR submissions, and then brought to the international institution to be addressed. Secondly, by addressing national struggles through the UN system as human rights claims, the state is being defined endorsed the primary responsible for ensuring that human rights are realized. Briefly, through the actions and support practices of the European youth organization, the young people involved are learning to identify and frame challenges of young people as human rights violations in the acceptable forms of language that the human rights discourse constitutes. However, using the human rights discourse and speaking about youth rights does not in itself constitute youth rights as a legally recognized matter. This requires institutional power that is derived through legalization of the rights claims by national and international institutions.