This week on International Horizons, Ellen Chesler interviews Rebecca Adami and Fatima Sator, editor and co-author of Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights that debunks the myth that the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were Western male-dominated inventions.  Moreover, the authors discuss how women did not act as a unified bloc in the first chapters of global governance, and that it has been women from the Global South such as Marie Sivomey from Togo, Jaiyeola Aduke Moore from Nigeria, Jeanne Martin Cissé from Guinea, Aziza Hussein from Egypt, Artati Marzuki from Indonesia, and Carmela Aguilar from Peru, Bertha Lutz from Brazil and Minerva Bernardino from Dominican Republic who were the main drivers of feminism in the early stages of the UN.

Transcript:

Ellen Chesler  00:15

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Ellen Chesler, and after a long career in academia –I was trained in history at Columbia in the 70s– but spent my professional life in government, and philanthropy, largely, writing a few things along the way and I am currently a research fellow at RBI.

Ellen Chesler  00:43

Vibrant non-governmental women’s organizations are advancing rights today in every corner of the world and on a global stage. Why is this work so important?  First, equality between the sexes has long been recognized as a fundamental moral and legal objective of the UN as an institution. Equal rights for women were inscribed in the UN Charter in 1945, in its foundational Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and in a stand-alone convention, the visionary Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted years later in 1980.  

Ellen Chesler  00:43

This week marks International Women’s Day, an annual celebration formalized by the United Nations in 1975, to call attention to the importance of gender equality and equity. Delegates from the UN’s member states are in New York this week for the annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. And thousands more women who provide essential support to this official body as outside experts, advocates, and lobbyists, are gathered beside them, some in person and many more online.

Ellen Chesler  01:46

Second, women’s empowerment has long been recognized as essential to the larger development objectives of the UN and the international community. Improving the status of women is not just the right thing to do, as Hillary Clinton once said, but also the smart and essential thing to do if we hope to create peace, prosperity, and a sustainable future for all.  Families, communities, countries, and regions simply do better when women are educated, formally employed, legally secured, and politically well represented. 

Ellen Chesler  02:16

Extensive empirical data from all over the world today informs and supports this thesis. We are fortunate to be joined today by Rebecca Adami of Sweden and Fatima Sator of Algeria, contributors to Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights, first published last year by Routledge and now available in paperback, and also available online through the internet. I was also fortunate to contribute to this important book, which Rebecca co-edited with Dan Plesch and Amitav Acharya. Rebecca is currently Associate Professor in education at Stockholm University. She’s a research associate as well at the Center for International Studies, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where Fatima is also a research associate. Although she currently resides in Geneva, and I believe works with the UN.

Ellen Chesler  03:15

We will discuss some of the major findings of the book and their relevance to contemporary policy and political debates on today’s podcast. My first question, then to Rebecca — kind of a general question — to begin our conversation, why does this history matter? Why is it important to uncover and tell the stories of women who came to the UN from all over the world and helped shape a body of international law, along with an institutional architecture that seeks to protect women from harm and to secure their rights? In other words, give us the top line arguments of this anthology.

Rebecca Adami  03:48

Thank you so much, Ellen, thank you for the introduction. I think this is a really important anthology with really meaningful contributions from different parts of the world. And this is a largely hidden history of the United Nations; the contributions by women from the Global South. And I think most of the listeners that did this podcast, they might assume that the work on gender equality and women’s international human rights that dates back maybe now longer than [the Fourth World Conference on Women in] Beijing in 1995. This history of women in the United Nations has far deeper roots going back to the founding years of the United Nations.

Rebecca Adami  04:36

I want to give two examples of how women from the Global South helped shape international human rights. I will talk more about the role of Indian women in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But I also want to mention already, the contribution by Roland Burke in his anthology from the 1950s, already where he’s writing about the first two conventions on Women’s International Human Rights, and they were preceding the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. You had one convention on consent, minimum age and registration for marriage and another convention on the political rights of women. And women delegates from newly independent states like Lakshmi Menon and Begum Hamidah from India felt that human rights as they were drafted in the Declaration of Human Rights were too lofty, and that what was needed was a translation into real rights for women in a binding UN convention.

Rebecca Adami  05:46

And women delegates from Pakistan, Iraq, Indonesia, Egypt, Kenya, Togo, Nigeria and Peru, argued for why women under colonial rule should not be exempted from these conventions. You had Marie Sivomey from Togo, you had Jaiyeola Aduke Moore from Nigeria, you had Jeanne Martin Cissé from Guinea, and they pointed out that it was unfair of Western representatives in the UN, to use custom to exclude women in different parts of the world: from the right to vote, and economic rights. You had Aziza Hussein from Egypt, and Artati Marzuki from Indonesia and Carmela Aguilar from Peru. And they felt that reference to custom was used by Western delegates in prejudiced ways to hold back the universalizing of human rights.

Rebecca Adami  06:45

And it was really important the work that they did, because in debating the universality of human rights, they ensured that there was not a clause in these two first Conventions, exempting human rights for women living under colonial rule. And this is something that has been taking into the history of the United Nations with other UN Conventions; that all of the Human Rights set forth also apply to people living in non self governing territories. And this was really important victory for representatives and women representatives from the Global South in the founding years of the United Nations.

Ellen Chesler  07:34

So the point you’re making is that Roland Burke also makes in his fine piece in this volume, is that women helped define the larger human rights enterprise. They really shaped the way the world thought about human rights, not as an imposition on countries, but as something rising from within and from the grassroots. And, obviously, most delegates to the UN are elites. They represent educated people in their societies. That’s a foundational principle of diplomacy. You have to speak many languages, you have to be comfortable in diplomatic circles. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a relationship with organizations that represent working people in your country and many others and civil society in your country. And the women particularly forge these relationships.

Rebecca Adami  08:28

I could give an example of that. In another chapter of the anthology, we have Aoife O’Donoghue and Adam Rowe who have written about the World Plan of Action from 1975. And there you see women, like the Domitila Barrios, from Bolivia, who came from the mining community, and who argued really strongly against Western feminism and against exploitation by Western countries of women from the Global South, and also women from indigenous communities and spoke of their experiences of being vital for development and for forging new international economic ties.

Ellen Chesler  09:17

Let’s move on because there’s so much to talk about in this book. It’s such a rich volume and I think it adds so many valuable perspectives. But just before we get to some more particulars, I want to talk about your concluding commentary that you wrote with your co-editors Dan Plesch, also of University of London SOAS and Amitav Acharya, Distinguished Professor of International Relations at the American University. You use the language of Michael Cole, in your concluding remarks to describe what the book accomplishes, call it, “restorative archaeology.” I just love that image. Can you explain a bit further what you meant by this? And you also, in the concluding commentary, write extensively about the many meanings of agency in international relations. Can you talk a bit more about that?

Rebecca Adami  10:17

So restorative archeology, especially here then in the history of the United Nations, is about bringing forth knowledge about, I would say, a counter narrative to the dominant historical narrative of human rights and gender equality at the UN: by writing into history, again the role of women and how they were actually pivotal in the work for international human rights.

Rebecca Adami  10:47

And it’s really important the argument by Acharya [about] agency from the Global South in international relations theory. Because agency has been coupled with an idea of liberal Western individuals. And through this kind of historical study into the UN and the role of women from the Global South, we have another reading of agency. Because agency is about being able to actually not just take part in the debates that you’re in, but actually being influential and being part of creating gender equality, of creating this idea of international human rights. So I would like to question the idea that we are just highlighting that there were women from the Global South in this history. What we’re doing, and what we’re seeing in these really inspiring — I would say — contributions to this volume, is that this agency was about shaping the forum and the framework of key international human rights conventions, and how we think about human rights today. But this agency has not been recognized before. So in this sense, this is a new historical narrative that is really important.

Ellen Chesler  11:12

You know, it’s so important to me, and so eye opening, because when I — I’m much older than the two of you, and as a young woman studying history in the 1960s, and 1970s, as an academic — kind of left out international relations, because I thought of it as kind of boys playing with their toys. And here, I found out that in fact, there were a lot of girls playing with these same toys, and that over the time and continuing today, it’s not just that we’re at the table as women, but women have shaped the table and shaped the discourse. They are extraordinary contributors not only to practice, but to theory and international relations.

Ellen Chesler  12:50

And when you see this, when you read these examples in this book, and read about these individuals in their lives, you come away so inspired. And so I’m gonna just close out this part of the conversation by reading one line in the commentary, which I just love. You write “the word restorative carries both the archaeological meaning of an object for studying and appreciation, but also a sense of buried treasure to illuminate and empower the contemporary world. At the present time, politics contains both efforts to advance human rights and the development of organized global humanity and also a profound reaction toward patriarchal tribalism. “

Ellen Chesler  13:29

This book gives you hope that we experienced a huge backlash to the contributions made by women, both practically and theoretically. And we’ve seen some large geopolitical circumstances that have disrupted the hope we had for this enterprise. We still have much to be inspired by and much to be hopeful about. So I want to bring Fatima to the conversation. You and your co author, Elise Dietrichson write about the role that Latin American women played in shaping the UN Charter and why their agency was for so long, forgotten or ignored. You begin your essay with a wonderful quote from Bertha Lutz of Brazil — who really deserves a book of her own and I think has recently gotten one, if I’m wrong about that, remind me– can you repeat the quote here and tell us more about this remarkable woman? Maybe she got a film that Fatima was part of –not a book but a film. Sorry about that. — Repeat that quote and tell us more about the remarkable woman who came to the UN from Latin America and then stood up to American delegates at the UN’s Organizational conference in San Francisco in April of 1945.

Fatima Sator  14:51

Thanks, Ellen. So, the quote is, “The mantle is falling off the shoulders of the Anglo-Saxons and we the Latin American women shall have to do the next stage of battle for women.”  And that’s a quote from Bertha Lutz. And so the story that I would tell you is just one of the treasures that Rebecca was mentioning. They’re full of them in this volume. So it’s the story of how Latin American women were able to include gender in the UN Charter. And I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say, and or to question, Where would we be today if it wasn’t without their contribution?

Fatima Sator  15:38

I’m not sure I would like to live in a world where they wouldn’t have the influence that they had. So to tell the story, we have to go back to 1945. We’re in San Francisco, we have hundreds of delegates from all over the world who gathered to sign the first international document that then resulted to be like the UN Charter. And amongst all those hundreds of delegates, only 3% of them were women. Sorry, actually, amongst those people who were not only delegates, so everyone, we only had 3% of women. And actually amongst the delegates who signed the charter, it was only four women. So it’s a very small percentage. However, the result and their impact is huge. Amongst those four women, only two of them actually fought for gender equality. So just to go back in history, the four women were Virginia Gildersleeve from the US, and Wuyi Fang from China. And then we have Bertha Lutz from Brazil and Minerva Bernardino from Dominican Republic, and only Bertha Lutz and Minerva Bernardino fought for gender equality.

Ellen Chesler  16:56

Yeah, and Virginia Gildersleeve, who was president of Barnard College, and representing Eleanor Roosevelt, who gets a lot of credit she deserves for the human rights agenda of the UN. But they both didn’t want to kind of muddy the waters by talking about equality, you know, absence of sex discrimination, they were kind of trying to get along with all of the hundreds of male delegates. And so they swept that under the rug. But these two very formidable women from Latin American countries that didn’t have the stature of China and the United States, needless to say, so they were fighting an uphill battle institutionally as well as substantively. They prevailed. And it’s an astonishing story, as you tell it would continue. I’m sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to put an exclamation point on what you’re saying.

Fatima Sator  17:45

Exactly. And then this is what was interesting for me as I was doing this research is that I realized, not only didn’t I have any idea about Bertha Lutz and Minerva Bernardino, I never heard of them. What I had in mind was Eleanor Roosevelt at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And I always thought that she gets the credit, that’s what I was told. However, looking at Bertha Lutz memoir, and then also looking at Virginia Gildersleeve memoir, I realized that not only did Bertha Lutz change the UN Charter where she included gender equality, but she faced huge opposition from the US –so did Virginia Gildersleeve– but also the British (as she was an advisor, so she wasn’t a delegate). So she did face a lot of backlash. It really wasn’t an easy task. For example, what she managed to do together with Minerva Bernardino; they were able to insert the word women in the UN Charter preamble where it says that equal rights of men and women.

Fatima Sator  19:01

If you read the UN Charter, if it wasn’t for them, we would have equal rights of men. And actually Virgina Gildersleeve had removed — she says in her memoir — the word man from the preamble. And what we found also quite problematic in the way we tell history, which is very political, the UN and most of the history books that we were finding, were always saying that four women signed the UN Charter and fought for gender equality, which is incorrect. And by doing this, they do something that is quite common, that is just to minimize women’s voices to their gender: we’re women so we all think the same.

Fatima Sator  19:43

So we had to get history right by saying: “well, of course they were women, but they didn’t agree at all.” So the preamble was the first legacy. Then we also have, in the first chapter of the UN Charter, Bertha Lutz [who] fought really hard to add the word sex in the list of non-discrimination of human rights. So if you read it without her, it would have been religion, race and language. And then thanks to her, she added the word sex.

Fatima Sator  20:16

And then I think the biggest achievement, the [key] moment, is article eight of the UN Charter. So article eight of the UN Charter, if you allow me to read it, it says, “[t]he United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal, and subsidiary organs.” So this is actually the first article, the first legal text that puts men and women at an equal level.

Fatima Sator  20:51

And the fight, the struggle she had to go through to get this article was really amazing. We have this anecdote where Virginia Gildersleeve invites Bertha Lutz for tea before the negotiations. And she tells her that she hoped that she wouldn’t bring anything about women, because that would be a very vulgar thing to do. So they had obviously very different views on what feminism is and was. And the British advisor actually also told her: “well, look, women have arrived.” And if we hadn’t arrived, the British adviser said: “well, I wouldn’t be where I am now.” She had a very, very high position to which Bertha Lutz replied, “well, it doesn’t mean that you are here, that all women got there.”

Fatima Sator  21:44

And that’s where she also has this very interesting thought where she says, “well, there is a very interesting psychological paradox where countries that are more advanced on this, tend to take it for granted.” And also tend to think that it’s global, which it wasn’t and it’s still not. And you can see it, this is still current.

Ellen Chesler  22:07

Which again, suggests –I’m just again, just emphasizing because in podcasts, it’s nice to repeat a little bit– the importance of the perspective of small countries, newly independent states. And their recognition that one couldn’t assume that if it didn’t say — I think the Indian women, Rebecca will remember this, in the negotiation of UDHR, if you don’t say women, if you say man, it will be men, when we go home. You can’t take for granted that people will see in the rights of men the rights of all people. And, you know, I think what’s so astonishing is that you see that same principle today now that we elevate women on a particular month or particular day. But often when the celebration of Women’s Human Rights Day is over as the International Women’s Day, you know, the debates go back and forget the importance. Not only to women, but to the larger well being of societies: spending every day ensuring that the resources for development are distributed to women’s and women’s organizations. That education, employment and so forth; laws protect women’s equal access. And particularly, governments themselves, that women’s representation in governments be protected. I want to bring Rebecca back into this just to say, can you talk a little bit about the architecture at the UN, just we need to get to the present day. But that results in CEDAW, the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and that also is a representation of the role that women from the Global South played. Eleanor Roosevelt felt that women’s rights could just be subsumed under the General Commission on Human Rights. Others took a different view. Tell us what happened.

Rebecca Adami  24:18

Yes. So this is right after the San Francisco conference and the adoption of the UN Charter, which sets the mandate for the United Nations. And as Fatima said, the inclusion of gender equality in the charter was really important. And Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, who had argued for the need to have a Commission on the Status of Women, continued that struggle after the adoption of the UN Charter when they were going to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So human rights are being mentioned in the UN Charter, but they’re not defined and later on, they were defined in 30 articles of the UDHR. And here is another, I think really interesting conflict between women delegate from the Dominican Republic saying that we need an all women commission looking at the human rights for women in different parts of the world, and really putting that at the forefront of debates, since women were in the minority in most delegations, or in all of the delegations that were represented at the time at the United Nations. Eleanor Roosevelt, who has been celebrated for her role as chair in the Human Rights Commission, was against the idea that the Commission on the Status of Women would have representatives on all the meetings where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were being drafted and debated.

Rebecca Adami  25:57

She felt that the Commission of Human Rights could adequately address issues of the rights of man. And this was also another interesting conflict that arose during the years from 1946 to 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, and that was that conflict between Hansa Mehta from India and Eleanor Roosevelt, because Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to keep the wording of all men in the declaration. So all men are equal in rights and dignity. All men have the rights set forth in this declaration, whereas Hansa Mehta said: “that well, if you write all men, that is going to exclude women from India and from other countries.” So she wanted the wording human beings instead, and human rights instead of the rights of man. And at that time, this might have been just a difference in how you saw the word men as inclusive or not for women. But the conflict in itself, I would say, shows that women from India, from Pakistan, from Latin America, are really important actors, and they had a strong agency at the United Nations in these founding years in ensuring that we have international human rights and not just the rights of man.

Ellen Chesler  27:27

And as you write so brilliantly in your contribution to your chapter that you contribute to this volume that you edited, in the 1950s and 60s, the fact that the Commission on the Status of Women exists separate from the Human Rights Commission, first of all, allows it to be a little bit removed from the Cold War, bogging down what happens in human rights, the kind of way in which the Soviet-US divide, the East-West divide, hijacks the Human Rights conversation in many ways. But it also gives women a safe space in which to really debate what women’s equality means. We don’t have any definition of it. We still don’t in the United States Constitution. Almost no constitutions other than the Soviet one, which was sort of not particularly well implemented, had it when the UN debates were taking place. So this, from the standpoint of generating ideas that are important in the 21st century, is hugely important. It’s a great takeaway from the UN that’s underappreciated and undervalued. And that I think is so well worth celebrating and talking about in more detail as we celebrate International Women’s Day. It’s an example of history really having relevance, I think, and it’s continued to have relevance in the debate of CEDAW, in the debate over in the Security Council on Women Peace and Security. Another chapter in the book, as you point out so well, in your introduction and in your commentary, points out the role that a very small state like Namibia had, but Namibia is a state where women really understood the importance of security because they’ve lived through so many internal and regional wars.

Rebecca Adami  27:31

This is something that I find really inspiring also with the contributions of this volume is how the dominant narrative of key international human rights treaties. You mentioned the Resolution 1325 on women’s role in peace and security, and how Namibia was part of advocating for that. But could you also please tell us more about the creation of one of the main — I think this is the convention that all the listeners will be really familiar with in terms of Women’s International Human Rights — Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. And, you know, the women who took a role in creating that because you’re also really sharing an important counternarrative here, Ellen.

Ellen Chesler  30:18

Well, yes. I wish I could tell this in a more fulsome way. We’re running out of time, and I do want to talk about today. But let me talk a little bit about CEDAW, which, as I said earlier, was adopted in 1980. Today, it enjoys the participation of more countries than any other human rights instrument, and the active engagement of a robust monitoring committee that meets several times a year in Geneva. And it names and shames countries. It provides, again, an architecture — I don’t think people understand this — where countries have to report on their progress. And that means that not only do they report, but civil society side reports holding the government accountable.

Ellen Chesler  31:01

So you have in this world, a robust discussion of women’s rights under the rubric of the UN. I should mention that the one country shamefully that does not participate is the US, which never ratified CEDAW. It was approved in 1979 by Jimmy Carter sent to the Senate, which has a very high bar for treaty ratification in our country, and has never been able to achieve enough votes for the US to participate in CEDAW, because of Republican opposition all these years, [and] in the early years even some ‘conservative’ Democratic opposition. So that’s why it’s not very well known in the US, but it has been employed elsewhere in the world, to help write constitutions that constitutionalize women’s equality, to write case laws, to write public policy on a variety of subjects. It’s a very innovative contribution to feminist jurisprudence. It’s not a tool of cultural imperialism as its critics both on the right and the left suggest.

Ellen Chesler  32:08

The research I did reveals a very different story. And the role of two women, principally one from Ghana [was] sent there by Kwame Nkrumah when he was the first president of the first newly independent state in Africa. [She was] one of the first women lawyers in her country or on the continent, and one of the first women judges, educated in London, to be sure, studied for the bar at the London School of Economics in the first wave of Africans, or Indians, people from the colonies were invited to these institutions. But a woman who had deep roots in both the religion and the culture of her country; she was the granddaughter of a successful woman who had been widowed young and was a trader and understood the importance of women’s political and economic participation. She was the chair of the committee that drafted a Declaration on Women’s Rights that became the blueprint of CEDAW. In the late 60s at the UN, she lived through the terrible reaction against Nicoma, and the years of military rule and oppression of the women who worked in the markets like her grandmother had. But ultimately Ghana came out on the right side of those difficulties in the 1970s and 80s. And she lived to see the writing of a constitution in her own country that protects the equal rights of women; non-discrimination against women.

Ellen Chesler  33:42

The architect 10 years later of the actual convention, which is such a fulsome capacious document with so many interesting examinations of what it means to really talk about equality. She is a woman named Leticia Ramos Shani from the ruling elite of her country. She was a cousin of Ferdinand Marcos, her brother Eddie Ramos opposed Marcus’s authoritarian regime and became the second democratically elected and democratic ruling president after Corazon Aquino, who they both supported in their country. They lived through, in other words, many conflicts in the Philippines. But they both understood from this the importance to functioning democracies, the full participation of women, not only in political life, but also in social and economic life and in family life. And I don’t have the time to go through the document. But what’s fascinating that CEDAW, as an example of feminist jurisprudence, is how carefully it looks at all of these different aspects of what constitutes discrimination, all forms of discrimination, as it says against women.

Rebecca Adami  35:03

I just wanted to clarify. So from your research, you question the dominant historical narrative that CEDAW was the creation by liberal Western feminists?

Ellen Chesler  35:14

Absolutely. The one thing you can say is that they were kind of cool on it. The Soviets were afraid it would just be an opportunity to call them to account for the absence of implementation of rights that they had, in theory guaranteed as part of their revolution in their country. The Americans were tired of paying for the human rights agenda and didn’t want another body to have to contribute to. And the one thing I can say for the West is that once the treaty was adopted, the Americans under Jimmy Carter –who, as anybody who knows about the history of human rights will know was the first president to really recognize human rights as important– they really decided if we were going to have a treaty, we had to have an implementing body and CEDAW is one of the examples of the best implemented, as I said earlier in my introduction to this section. It’s the most rigorous implementing body, the CEDAW Committee, and really worth studying. There are large volumes. There are many US scholars that have studied the implementation, and many reports written over the years to try to encourage US participation, which shows how valuable this treaty has been on the ground all over the world.

Ellen Chesler  36:32

Let’s just close out today. We have a few more minutes when we can talk about the contemporary relevance of this history. Interestingly, today, people listening to this podcast about women’s human rights will think, “oh, it’s hopeless.” Afghanistan and Iran point to the tremendous backlash that these rights have produced in their countries. And at a time when economic and other circumstances of globalization have so many discontents that are legitimate, and women have sort of become an easy target for globalization’s discontents. Men who are in countries that have not succeeded well, in a globalized economy that has been set back by so many neoliberal economic policies, find an easy target in women’s rights advocates. You know, “it’s your fault, it’s the women’s fault.”

Ellen Chesler  37:40

The priority theme for this CSW is actually how the digital revolution has fostered this strong backlash against women, amplified hate speech and amplified examples of violence against women and other forms of misogyny. It also recognizes, however, that the internet has given women a digital meeting space and has in many ways helped grow the resistance and the global community of women’s groups all over the world. So like so many things, it’s not perfect, and it’s not good either. We have to see it as kind of what it has produced, but also for the many problems that it is amplified.

Ellen Chesler  38:38

In addition, I read this morning on Pass Blue, the excellent blog of about the UN that is produced by the New School, that the Prime Minister of Pakistan — who is Benazir Bhutto’s son, the first woman, Prime Minister of Pakistan, who was a huge spokesperson for women’s rights and may indeed have paid for that with her life — has spent a lot of time this week in meetings to talk about the many interpretations of women’s rights in Islamic tradition. Something Fatima I think could talk to. So I guess just in closing out, I’d like you to comment on these various factors and other developments of recent decades that have both put some brakes on the women’s agenda, but also given us cause for hope and optimism and helped grow opportunities for women in all corners of the world to claim their rights. Can you talk a little bit about what you find hope concerning most and then, because it’s nicer to end on optimism, some aspect of what gives you hope for the future. Maybe we should bring Fatima in first because the two of us have been talking a lot. And then finally let you close out, Rebecca.

Fatima Sator  40:09

Thanks, Ellen. Yes, indeed, I think it’s easy to be shown in the negative and worrying spin when you look at today’s situation. However, I do agree with you that there are a lot of positive signs that would tell us that, “yes, we’re moving in the right direction.” Maybe not fast enough. I think like two weeks ago, I was hearing the UN Secretary General mentioning that we need 300 years to achieve gender equality. So obviously, at this pace, where we’re moving really slowly. However, what I see around me I find, like this volume for example, is an effort to shift the hegemonic narrative that we’ve been taught so far. And why is it important? It is important because it builds ownership around ideas. So myself coming from a country that I would consider from the Global South, Algeria, I do feel much more entitled, and I do feel ownership around ideas such as feminism. And this feeling has gotten stronger thanks to this research and has grown stronger thanks to the book that Rebecca and Dan have edited. So I feel like we are finding more and more of those voices. We are offering a counternarrative; it’s not only the dominant narrative that is prevailing. And only this makes me really hopeful.

Ellen Chesler  42:00

Rebecca, some closing comments?

Rebecca Adami  42:03

Yeah. So I think that I was initially also buying into the more theoretical arguments given by a feminist and post-structuralist scholars who I’m really inspired by but who said that human rights was just a Western male project. But looking into the history, we see that this has been a false assumption. And in the same way that history has silenced the role of women, I feel a hope now in post-colonial theory and decolonial theory that we question white ignorance. In the sense that, for example, in Sweden, you know, the Swedish government took a role in discriminating against our indigenous population and women in the Sami population through legislation. I think that those kinds of histories need to be unearthed and talked about. So that we get a new understanding of what kind of structures have actually been creating human rights violations and hindering equality and justice, so as not to continue tapping into this  ignorant and also false narrative that Western liberal discourse is the owner of all international human rights.

Ellen Chesler  43:56

Thank you so much. That’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Rebecca and Fatima once again for taking time to be with us and for sharing their many insights about the role of women and particularly women from the Global South in shaping modern international human rights discourse. I hope our audience enjoyed this conversation and will remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I also want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan McKay for sharing his song “International Horizons” as this theme music for the show. This is Ellen Chesler saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for another episode of International Horizons.