Beyond Good Governance: Rethinking Civil Society, Human Rights, and Democracy Promotion, May 14-16
"Beyond Good Governance: Rethinking Civil Society, Human Rights, and Democracy Promotion" will be convened at Brown University, by the Watson Institute for International Studies, from May 14-16, 2009.
The conference will address the new development lexicon that has emerged in the wake of the Washington Consensus, and established a set of accepted common sense assumptions about the path to modernization and social change. These include the proposition that participation and accountability neutralize corruption and hierarchy, that civil society and NGOs should be the privileged agents of development, that institutionalizing human rights and the rule of law advance the interests of the disenfranchised, and that good (read: local, participatory) governance can solve the problems of poverty and inequality, among many others. Meanwhile, through the mainstreaming of these dominant models, best practices have been consolidated and new regimes of neo-liberal institution building have been advanced.
This conference is part of a set of activities being undertakin by an Inter‐University Consortium, “Social Movements and 21st Century Cultural‐Political Transformations.” The previous conference in the series, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2008, focused on “two faces of social struggles in the Americas today: the proliferation of civic participation through so-called third sector organizations and governmental programs, on the one hand, and the increased visibility of ‘less civil-ized,’ more contentious collective action, on the other.”
This conference will take stock of this discussion from a range of vantage points. A wave of critical scholarship has challenged many of these assumptions, calling into question participatory best-practices, as well as the master concept of civil society itself. New terrains of scholarship have emerged which critically engage questions of civil society and human rights beyond the optic of good governance. This scholarship includes work on the blurry boundaries between formal institutions and informal politics, such as the "grey zones" of clandestine political activity, marketed democracy promotion schemes, and various expressions of everyday politics that challenge easy classification.
While most authors are generally weary of facile dismissals of civil society and human rights, they nonetheless engage in a range of critical discussions that expose the workings of power through and not against civil society actors, participatory institutions, democracy promotion projects, and human rights regimes.
The challenge we pose to ourselves and to conference participants is to ask what we can learn by having these discussions in dialogue with each other. It will be organized so as to maximize discussion across regions, and against the insularity of discipline. We believe these questions can be fruitfully explored through an interdisciplinary conversation that extends from law to sociology, history to anthropology, political science to cultural studies.
Convening Committee:
Gianpaolo Baiocchi
Associate Professor of International Studies; Associate Professor of Sociology; Director, Development Studies Program, Brown University
Vasuki Nesiah
Director of International Affairs and Lecturer in International Studies, Brown University
For a list of Beyond Good Governance presenters and Attendees click here.