TAFAHRN15U Optional course: Human Rights and NGOs in Africa

This course focuses on NGOs, development and human rights interventions and discourse in Africa. The aim is to provide the foundation for a critical analysis of the human rights paradigm and the policy and practices of NGOs. The course has a broad analytical focus on how different development and human rights discourse is translated and appropriated in different African contexts. This links up to broader debates around what civil society is in Africa, how we can understand state-society relations as well as the dilemmas and paradoxes of rights practice when applied to violence in Africa.

Human rights discourse has over the last decades become a dominant lens through which Africa is understood and rights-based development a dominant paradigm through which to ‘reform’ Africa. In much the same way, the focus in development policy on the importance of civil society for development has foregrounded the NGO sector as a counter-weight to the state or as providing alternative forms of development. The course discusses these assumptions and aims at offering a counter-balance to the more legal and normative approached to rights and development.  

The lectures will pay attention to rights-based reform practices in development and in transitional justice, to NGO practice and policy in different contexts such as humanitarian situations, development projects, advocacy work, covering issues such as authority, the politics and historicity of the post-colonial state, legal pluralism, violence as well as the relation between benefactors and beneficiaries. Through discussion of empirical cases we will explore the common assumptions and conceptual links between a variety of interventions, for example: police and prison officer training, truth commissions, civil society support, and international advocacy campaigns.