Why do some organizations adopt human rights as the frame for their advocacy while others do not? Kristi Heather Kenyon examines this question in the context of HIV advocacy in Africa in Resilience and Contagion: Invoking Human Rights in African HIV Advocacy. The term frame refers to the strategic way social movement actors conceptualize and package their grievances to legitimize and motivate collective action (Benford and Snow, Reference Benford and Snow2000). The dilemma confronting HIV organizations that Kenyon lays out in the introductory chapter is that compared to other available frames such as development, public health or human security, human rights can be a “divisive and politicizing discourse” that lays blame squarely at the foot of the state (5). Moreover, in the African context, some argue that rights conflict with traditional values, such as communalism. Thus despite the ubiquity of rights discourse, the choice of human rights as a way to frame HIV advocacy is not an inevitable one for activists.
The heart of the book is three chapters that detail variation in frame choice among the nine organizations that Kenyon tracks in Botswana, South Africa, Ghana and Uganda, classifying them as “rights-dominant”, “rights-mixed” and rights-limited” organizations. In her most persuasive chapter, Kenyon examines three organizations that have adopted human rights framing. Conventional wisdom about rights framing is that organizations choose rights frames because they are effective at holding governments accountable to citizens—they can compel governments to change their behavior (Keck and Sikkink, Reference Keck and Sikkink1998; Mertus, Reference Mertus2007). In the case of HIV, this might mean providing antiretroviral drugs or engaging in public-awareness campaigns to reduce stigma. By contrast, Kenyon argues that HIV organizations choose rights frames “primarily due to a firm belief in the individual-level impact of rights, which is transmitted through strong leadership and facilitated or constrained by organizational structure” (9). In other words, Kenyon finds that committed leaders of relatively centralized organizations choose rights frames to change the behavior of their constituents, not their governments.
Rights work on states in a roundabout way, making citizens who are responsible for their health and able to demand more resources from the government. Activists from BONELA (Botswana Network on Ethics, Law and HIV/AIDS) did not bring up rights as providing leverage with the state, emphasizing instead the “empowerment” that results from a human rights approach to HIV. One organizer said, “To me it inculcates that so you are empowered to know what you are entitled to, what the other person is entitled to and in that way you are responsible for your own health and responsible for other people's health. That's the link. You claim rights wherever you go” (60). Organizers provided similar responses in all three of the rights-dominant groups.
Kenyon observes that all the organizations she researched have at least some degree of international connectivity, including those that partially adopt rights language and those that eschew it. Organizations, she writes, “can be exposed to rights, have allies using the rights frame, and have donors who support the rights frame yet not adopt this frame themselves” (132). For example, many organizers in the NACWOLA (National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS) in Uganda had previously worked in international development, and the majority of the group's funding comes from abroad. Organizations like NACWOLA that deployed rights sparingly instead emphasized the importance of “participatory approaches” in their advocacy (104). Organizations therefore remain able to prioritize their constituents’ needs and identities and conduct their advocacy as they see fit, even with strong ties to international donors. Thus another of Kenyon's major findings is that while relationships with donors certainly figure into activists’ calculus for choosing a rights frame, this source of external pressure is not decisive.
Kenyon's book makes a significant contribution to the political science literature on HIV and social movements (Paxton, Reference Paxton2012). Her study buttresses critiques of dominant approaches to framing that are overly state-centric and challenges the assumption that civil society organizations in Africa are too weak to contend with donor priorities. I believe the text could have been strengthened with more critical engagement with rights. Chapter titles such as “Resisting Rights-ification” suggest that “catching” rights might not always be in every organization's best interest. While Kenyon helps us understand the added purchase of a rights approach by arguing that rights “transform people from recipients to participants” (207), it strikes me as important to explore some enduring criticisms of rights even when deployed by community-based organizations (Cruikshank, Reference Cruikshank1999). What kind of citizens are HIV organizations creating when they “empower” constituents through rights?
As with any successful book, this one raises questions for future researchers to explore. What does the salience or non-salience of rights in different country contexts tell us about the quality of democracy in each case? Does Kenyon's finding about organizations’ perceived impact of rights frames transfer to other advocacy or policy areas? While NGOs may perceive rights to be efficacious for changing individual behavior, what actually works best to reduce the prevalence of the disease? Kenyon's text provides ample material for scholars to explore questions of rights and advocacy in Africa and beyond.
