Paper details
| Paper authors | Maria Cullen |
| In panel on | Revisiting the Nexus Between Human Rights and Humanitarianism |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
The end of the Cold War is mythologised as the moment that allowed human rights to be mainstreamed in humanitarianism, yet NGOs and social movements from the Global South played a significant role in shaping the adoption of rights rhetoric in the 1980s. When thousands of Salvadorans fled civil war to Honduras in 1980, they were met with a hostile host-state whose Army collaborated with its Salvadoran counterpart in kidnapping and murdering refugees suspected of collaboration with revolutionary militants.
What does protection and rights-based engagement mean in such extreme circumstances? Humanitarians grappled with this question and ultimately disagreed over the boundaries of their role. Refugees campaigned against the UNHCR and Honduran state’s attempts to relocate camps 50km away from the international border, rejecting the claim that this was a legitimate protection measure because they feared the Honduran as much as the Salvadoran Army. While Oxfam, for example, took up the refugees’ rights-based call to campaign against the forced relocation, Medecins Sans Frontieres (the NGO most associated with the turn to human rights in the 1990s) did not. The reasons for this come down to organisational culture and Cold War positionalities. This paper thus provides a critical historical perspective on contemporary discussions about the implications of ‘rights-based’ engagement by exploring its contested understandings in this setting.
