DEFINITIONS

COMMUNITY

Although the word ‘community’ is commonly used and generally has positive connotations, the term itself is problematic. It is used in many ways (Bauman 2001, Chile 2007, Bryson & Mowbray 1981, Ife 2002, Ife & Tesoriero 2006, Kenny 2006). Before we start making sense of the idea of community development, therefore, we need to examine the idea of community itself. Just what is it that we are aiming to ‘develop’? When we examine the following usages of the word ‘community’, we find that it conveys a variety of meanings:

• community care

• the Australian community

• a community centre

• widespread community debate

• the academic community

• the Google Earth community

• the Muslim community

• the needs of the local community

• consulting community representatives

• the global community

• community mental health

• community grassroots initiatives.

A word used in so many ways defies strict definition. It is more appropriate to think, instead, about all the meanings that it has in its different contexts. Ultimately, ‘community’ is subjective. It means what the person using the word decides it will mean. It is therefore important to look at this constellation of meanings.

The first thing to note is the positive connotations that the word ‘community’ has for us. Community is generally seen as a ‘good thing’: as something to be valued or desired. Although there can be no doubt that communities have been and can be oppressive, this negative view is usually far outweighed by the good feelings the word seems to generate.

It will be recalled that in previous chapters seven dimensions of community development and of human rights were identified: social, economic, political, cultural, environmental, spiritual and survival. When we discuss these seven in relation to enacting human rights from below, we must remember that a holistic approach to human rights from below implies that all seven are important: none should necessarily have primacy over the others in a general sense, though in any particular community setting one or two may be seen as more important in responding to local circumstances.

While different human rights workers will have strengths in different areas, and will choose to concentrate on perhaps one or two areas in particular, they should never lose sight of a more overall, holistic view of human rights from below. Just as all seven are necessary for effective community development, so all seven are necessary for human rights from below, as without all seven some important aspects of humanity, and of community, will be missed.

SOCIAL RIGHTS AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Social rights are particularly appropriate for a perspective of human rights from below. Our social rights to things such as education, housing, health care (though this can also be included under ‘survival rights’), recreation, choice of marriage partner and family lifestyle, work and meaningful relationships cannot readily be articulated in a universalist, context-free sense. What these social rights mean, and how they are defined and enacted, will vary significantly according to context.

PRINCIPLES

As we shall see, the very nature of community development precludes specific ‘how to’ procedures for ‘doing’ community development. However, it is certainly possible to derive a number of higher-level principles which, while not being narrowly prescriptive, can nevertheless provide a framework within which community development takes place.

The perspective on community development outlined in this book is not necessarily shared by other writers. Specifically, the approaches to community development based on predetermined outcomes, top-down planning or program implementation and step-by-step processes are incompatible with the more organic and ‘from below’ perspective developed here.

Community development can be regarded as a way of thinking, as a philosophy of practice, rather than merely as a process for building stronger communities. In this sense, many people who are not specifically labelled ‘community development’ workers can still work from a community development perspective. Health professionals, teachers, development workers, social workers, lawyers, recreation workers, artists, planners, librarians and researchers are just some of the occupational groups that can, and in many cases do, work from a community development perspective by incorporating some or all of the principles discussed below into their work. Similarly, community members who may be out of the workforce for a variety of reasons (unemployed, retired, parenting or caring for a relative) or who may be employed in jobs that have nothing to do with community development, can still engage with their community according to these principles and can play key roles in community development.

This book deals with two concepts, human rights and community development. Each of these is made up of two words whose meanings are complex and contested. One of the problems with much of the literature about either human rights or community development is that it too often treats the component words as non-problematic – indeed as self-evident in their meaning. Yet the four words human, rights, community and development are all highly problematic. Their meanings lend themselves to different interpretations, and the way in which each of them is used is highly ideological and value-laden. Therefore a book about human rights and community development explores difficult and contested territory. Part of our concern in this book will be to explore these difficult terms. Our aim is not to come up with a single ‘clear’ understanding of them, as all of them defy such simplistic treatment, but rather to understand some of the richness of thinking that lies behind each, and the questions that this thinking poses for anyone who claims to be concerned about human rights, or community development, or both.

As we explore the ideas of community development and human rights, what becomes clear is the common ground between them and the way in which each not only can contribute to the other, but also cannot do without the other.

OUTLINE FOR A WORKSHOP

1. Introductions, etc. are made. The facilitator outlines the program for the workshop.

2. The facilitator gives a presentation of the different dimensions of human rights, identifying the seven dimensions used in the horizontal axis of the matrix.

3. The facilitator gives a presentation of ideas about the cultural, religious, philosophical and ideological origins of human rights, emphasising diversity.

4. Participants break into seven groups (or multiples of seven for larger groups). Each group is allocated one category of rights (social, economic, etc.) and asked to apply the ideas from the previous presentation to that category of rights. Each group is given a set of questions about the cultural, religious, philosophical and ideological traditions of human rights, as listed on the next page, and asked to put their ideas on butcher's paper.

5. Each small group briefly reports back to the whole group, allowing time for questions and suggestions from others.

6. The facilitator gives a brief presentation on individual and collective ideas of rights.

7. Each group is then assigned a different category of rights (for example, the group that first had social rights might be allocated economic rights) and given a new set of questions related to individual/collective rights, and the process is repeated.

This process (steps 3 to 5) is repeated until all eight sets of questions have been applied to all seven categories of rights; that is, all 56 sections of the matrix have been completed and there are 56 pieces of butcher's paper (or more if there are more than seven groups).

DEFINITIONS

‘HUMAN’

As with community development, attempting any clear definition of human rights is not easy. To understand why, we need to start with the two words themselves. Human and rights are both words that defy easy definition, and the definitional issues around each of them cloud any overall understanding of something called ‘human rights’. In the human rights literature there has been more concern with the problematics of the term ‘rights’ than there has been with the problematics of the term ‘human’, and this has downplayed the importance of a very contested idea.

The word ‘human’ may at first sight seem unproblematic, but it needs to be remembered that over time there have been different constructions of who, or what, counts as human (Foucault 1970, Hunt 2007, Taylor 1989). One reason the Nazis were so readily able to persecute Jews was that Jews were regarded as a somehow ‘sub-human’ species. In times of war it is common to ‘dehumanise’ (that is, see as less than fully human) the enemy, which makes it easier to hate and to kill; examples include British newspaper cartoons depicting Germans during World War I, similar portrayals of Japanese people during World War II and the language used by US soldiers in depicting the ‘enemy’ in Vietnam. In each instance the dehumanising implied that the people portrayed as ‘sub-human’ were not entitled to full ‘human rights’ and so did not need to have those rights protected.

In this section we will examine the practice of human rights from below. It is important not only to understand human rights from below and the ideas that have been explored in previous sections, but also to think about what it means to enact this perspective of human rights. Here we will not only be concerned with what the ‘human rights practitioner’ might do – the advocate, the community development worker, the NGO worker – but also what human rights from below means for community members, engaged citizens, volunteers and others. One of the important aspects of a community development approach is that it is not confined exclusively to a community development worker but rather engages the entire community. Applying the same perspective to human rights from below implies that we are all concerned with working for human rights, whether paid or unpaid, activist, volunteer, citizen or engaged professional.

WAYS OF PRACTISING HUMAN RIGHTS FROM BELOW

Of the two fields discussed in this book – community development and human rights – community development has put more effort into considering the problematic of practice. In human rights, practice is often regarded as unproblematic – difficult, challenging and potentially dangerous, of course, but clear and straightforward in its nature. It is couched largely in terms of legal practice: advocacy, bringing cases to anti-discrimination tribunals or to courts, appealing to the United Nations.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF EACH TO THE OTHER

In this section, we will examine the potential contributions that community development and human rights can make to each other, both theoretically and in terms of practice.

Both human rights and community development are powerful ideals and, in the forms developed in previous chapters, each has the potential to make significant contributions to progressive politics and to movements for social change. However, this does not necessarily happen. Both community development and human rights can be constructed in ways that are more conservative and indeed reactionary. Community development can readily become a discourse of exclusion, of border protection, used to pursue racist, sexist or homophobic ends. Similarly, approaches to human rights can be developed in ways that reinforce an individual's right to dominate others, including the right to manage, the right to bear arms, the right to own media and manipulate public opinion, the right to express views that insult the dignity of others or the right to earn excessive salaries while others remain poor.

It must therefore be emphasised that, in the discussion that follows in this and later chapters, the terms human rights and community development are used specifically in the ways outlined in previous chapters and not in other ways that may be adopted by various media and other commentators. Each is a complex and contested idea requiring nuanced understanding, and each contains political/ideological implications that need to be identified and articulated.

PRINCIPLES

Human rights are commonly considered to be:

• universal; belonging to everybody regardless of race, nation, culture, sex, age, ability, beliefs or behaviour

• indivisible; unable to be separated from each other, but belonging together as a package

• inalienable; unable to be taken away from an individual or group

• inabrogable; unable to be given away, voluntarily or as a trade-off for some other privilege.

In reality, none of these principles applies in the way we understand and enact human rights. Perhaps the most contentious of the four is universalism which, if applied uncritically, can lead to a denial of the importance of culture and diversity and the imposition of one form of human rights (usually a very Western construction) in cultures that do not accept its assumptions (Douzinas 2000, 2007, Pereira 1997). Such an approach to universal human rights can become part of a colonialist agenda.

Clearly there is a need for a more nuanced approach to universalism (Brown 1999), taking account of cultural context while at the same time not succumbing to the dangers of an extreme relativism, which is as untenable as an extreme universalism. This issue of universalism and context is one of the most contentious in human rights discourse and it will be discussed in some detail later in this chapter. A naïve and uncritical universalism is problematic, and hence the assertion that human rights are universal cannot be allowed to go unchallenged, and is not always observed in practice.

The indivisibility of human rights is also potentially problematic.