Building and breaking solidarity: learning from transnational advocacy networks and struggles for women's human rights

Abstract

In the past two decades, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in Latin America have increasingly engaged in transnational legal mobilization, using the inter-American human rights system to pressure states to make legal and policy changes, to promote human rights ideas and cultures, and to strengthen the demands of social movements (C. Santos 2007). In addition to professionalized human rights NGOs, diverse feminist and women’s NGOs, as well as victims of human rights abuses, have engaged in transnational legal activism as a strategy to reconstruct and promote women’s human rights discourses and norms. This type of legal mobilization illustrates what Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) call “transnational advocacy networks” (TANs). Indeed, the human rights and feminist NGOs involved in transnational legal mobilization create networks to communicate and exchange legal and other kinds of knowledge, forming transnational alliances to “plead the causes of others or defend a cause or proposition” (ibid., 8).