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Book Title: Research Handbook on International Human Rights Law
Editor(s): Joseph, Sarah; McBeth, Adam
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN (hard cover): 9781847203687
Section: Chapter 5
Section Title: NGOs and Human Rights: Channels of Power
Author(s): Spiro, Peter J.
Number of pages: 24
Extract:
5. NGOs and human rights: channels of power
Peter J Spiro
1 Introduction
Non-governmental organizations (`NGOs') present a formidable theoretical
challenge to traditional conceptions of international law and international rela-
tions. In the Westphalian model, states alone have enjoyed international legal
personality. To the extent that other actors must be processed by international
law, it has been only in relation to the state. NGOs and other non-state actors
were historically framed as dependent entities, insofar as they were addressed
at all.1
That was an understandable tendency, as a matter of both empirics and
theory. Although the history is now being rewritten in light of their rising
contemporary prominence, NGOs were of secondary importance in interna-
tional relations on the ground during the modern period. As a matter of theory,
to concede independent power to NGOs would have undermined the logic of
the state-based system. In the one sense, NGOs could be ignored; in the other,
they had to be ignored.
That is no longer an option. Since the end of the Cold War and the dawn of
globalization, no analysis of international relations can credibly bracket the
role of NGOs. Non-state actors have emerged as important players on the
international scene. Across issue areas, NGOs exercise influence on interna-
tional processes. The role is perhaps most prominent in the context of human
rights, in terms of both the density and the prominence of NGO activity.
The role of NGOs remains under-theorized. A burgeoning social ...
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ELECD/2010/194.html