u

INTRODUCTION

‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and
well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and
medical care.

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights

and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realised’.1

‘In just seventeen years since the end of the Cold War, over 300 million
human beings have died prematurely from poverty related causes, with some
18 million more added each year. Much larger numbers of human beings live
in conditions of life-threatening poverty . . . This catastrophe was and is
happening, foreseeably, under a global economic order designed for the
benefit of the affluent countries’ governments [and] corporations’.2

The philosopher Thomas Pogge has identified a contradiction that lies at

the heart of contemporary global affairs: international law simultan-
eously recognises and violates the human rights of the global poor.3 It
recognises the global poor’s rights to the degree that rights closely related
to poverty elimination – such as rights to health, education, housing,
food, water, social security and employment – are enunciated in numer-
ous international treaties. Yet international law also systematically vio-
lates these rights by establishing and maintaining institutional structures
designed to contribute to the persistence of severe poverty. Pogge argues
that core international institutions such as the World Trade Organization
(WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank all

1
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 GA Res 217A(III), 10 December 1948, A/810,
arts. 22 & 28.
2
Thomas Pogge, ‘Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation’ in Thomas Pogge (ed.),
Freedom from Poverty as a Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2007) 51–52.
3
Thomas Pogge, ‘Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the
Global Poor’ (2005) 18(4) Leiden Journal of International Law 717.

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 2 introduction
significantly contribute towards ‘a collective human rights violation of
enormous proportion’.4
This book examines how global justice movements have engaged the
language of socioeconomic rights to contest global institutional struc-
tures and rules responsible for contributing to the persistence of severe
poverty. Drawing upon a range of perspectives from critical international
studies and critical political economy – most notably the neo-Gramscian
perspective – the book will evaluate the ‘counter-hegemonic’ potential of
socioeconomic rights discourse, which is to say, its capacity to contribute
towards an alternative to the prevailing neo-liberal ‘common sense’ of
contemporary global governance. This introduction will provide the
backdrop against which this issue will be examined.

PATHOLOGIES OF POWER
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 were hailed by many as the beginning of a new era of increased
prosperity and respect for human rights.5 In spite of such optimism,
the ensuing ten years were described by the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) as ‘a decade of despair’ for many.6 By the new millen-
nium some fifty-four countries were poorer than they were in 1990.7 During
that same period inequality rose exorbitantly, both between and within
countries, with the richest 1 percent of the world’s population receiving
as much as the poorest 57 percent.8 Within that decade the number
of people living on less than $1 a day increased in the Arab States, Central
and Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.9
By 2003 it was estimated that 10 million children were dying of preventable

4
ibid.
5
For the most infamous expression of this idea see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History
and the Last Man (Penguin, 1992).
6
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Summary: Human Development
Report 2003: Millennium Development Goals: A Compact among Nations to End Human
Poverty (Oxford University Press, 2003) 2 (hereafter ‘UN Human Development Report’).
7
ibid.
8
UNDP, Human Development Report 2003: Millennium Development Goals: A Compact
among Nations to End Human Poverty (Oxford University Press, 2003) 39. Such inequality
was only the tip of the iceberg. A recent report from Oxfam suggests that the bottom half of
the globe’s population now owns the same as the world’s richest eight people. Oxfam, ‘An
Economy For the 99%’ (16 January 2017) https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/
file_attachments/bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf accessed 30 January 2017.
9
ibid, 5.

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 pathologies of power 3
illnesses every year10 and some 115 million were not attending primary
school.11 On average more than 500,000 women died in pregnancy and
childbirth every year.12
Further shocking developments unfolded after the turn of the millen-
nium. In 2006 rapid and sharp increases in staple food prices placed basic
grains beyond the reach of millions of the World’s poor.13 According to
the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in
2009 more than one billion became undernourished worldwide, the largest
number in recorded history.14 The on-going economic and financial crisis
that began in 2008 has also generated ‘bleak prospects for social develop-
ment’.15 Global unemployment rose sharply from 178 million people in
2007 to 205 million in 2009, triggering increased levels of vulnerability,
particularly in countries without comprehensive social protection.16 The
growing pressure for austerity measures, ostensibly for reasons of fiscal
consolidation, is putting pressure on social protection, public health and
education programmes, as well as economic recovery measures.17 The
joint IMF and World Bank Global Monitoring 2010 report estimated that
an additional 64 million people fell into extreme poverty as a result of the
economic crisis alone.18
As Paul Farmer has pointed out, the persistence of poverty is neither an
‘accident’ nor ‘random in distribution and effect’, but is rather the symp-
tom of ‘deeper pathologies of power’ that are intimately connected to social
conditions that determine who will suffer, and who will benefit, from
particular arrangements.19 It is no secret who has benefited the most from
the post-cold-war ‘Washington Consensus’ of the globalisation era. In a
2014 Report entitled Working for the Few: Political Capture and Economic

10
ibid, 8. This is perhaps understandable when one considers that only 10 percent of global
spending on medical research and development is directed at the diseases of the poorest
90 percent of the world’s people. See ibid, 12.
11 12
ibid, 6. ibid.
13
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FOA), ‘More People than
Ever Are Victims of Hunger: Background Document’ (2009). www.unmalawi.org/news
room/press_release/press_release_june_en.pdf accessed 17 January 2012.
14
ibid.
15
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The Global Social Crisis:
Report on the World Social Situation 2011 (15 June 2011) UN Doc. ST/ESA/334 24.
16 17
ibid, iii. ibid, 6.
18
World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Global Monitoring Report 2010: The
MDGs after the Crisis (World Bank, 2010) viii.
19
Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor
(University of California Press, 2005) 7.

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 4 introduction
Inequality, the anti-poverty global confederation Oxfam International
affirmed what many ‘anti-globalisation’ activists had been arguing for
decades: that over the course of the last thirty years the arena of policy
making has been progressively colonised by the very wealthy.20 As a result
of ‘political and regulatory capture’, policies and laws have increasingly
been skewed in favour of the rich, entrenching and enhancing their
privileged status whilst further marginalising the poor.21
This phenomenon is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in relation
to the formulation of international trade rules. To illustrate, in the run up to
the negotiations for the proposed European Union-United States trade deal
known as the ‘Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’ (or ‘TTIP’)
in 2012 and early 2013, 92 percent of the ‘stakeholders’ in consultations with
the European Commission’s trade department were business lobbyists. By
contrast, a mere 4 percent of consultations were with public interest
groups.22 Corporate and financial power has been both the driving force
and the principle beneficiary of the neo-liberal economic policies advanced
by the WTO, IMF and World Bank since the early 1990s. Policies and laws
requiring public spending reduction, the removal of price controls, trade
liberalisation, financial deregulation and the privatisation of public utilities
and services have facilitated unprecedented capital accumulation on a world
scale by removing trade barriers, creating new markets and reducing the
taxation and regulation of corporate and financial activity.23
At the same time, these policies are implicated in undermining socio-
economic rights. Many commenters have documented how trends such
as the increased reliance upon the market, the diminution in the role of
State provision of social services and the deregulation of financial and
labour markets have exposed workers, poor people and vulnerable
groups to the vicissitudes of the market and made the objects of their
socioeconomic rights less secure.24 This book takes as its starting point

20
Oxfam, ‘Working for the Few’ 187 Oxfam Briefing Paper (20 January 2014) www.oxfam
.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-
200114-summ-en.pdf accessed 28 January 2014.
21
ibid.
22
Corporate Europe Observatory, ‘Who Lobbies Most for TTIP’ (Corporate Europe Obser-
vatory 8 July 2014) http://corporateeurope.org/international-trade/2014/07/who-lobbies-
most-ttip accessed 25 June 2015.
23
Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy, ‘The Neoliberal (Counter-) Revolution’ in Alfredo
Saad-Fiho and Deborah Johnson (eds.) Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader (Pluto Press,
2005) 13–19.
24
See discussion in Chapter 2, Section 2.2.3.

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 accumulation and its dispossessed 5
the belief that the ‘neo-liberal turn’ in global governance has engendered
widespread, profound and intolerable injustices for the world’s poor. It
therefore follows Conor Gearty in arguing that human rights must be
‘subversive rather than supportive of such a brutal status quo’ in order to
survive as a meaningful language of emancipation.25

ACCUMULATION AND ITS DISPOSSESSED

Neo-liberal globalisation has undoubtedly served vested corporate and
financial interests but in so doing it has also adversely impacted the
lives of millions of the world’s poor. Global rules and agreements have
in many instances had the effect of eroding social protection and
expropriating local communities and primary producers of the means
of subsistence. These processes, which the Marxist geographer David
Harvey has termed ‘accumulation by dispossession’26 form an integral
and on-going dimension of the capitalist mode of production and have
intensified in nature and scope in the contemporary era of neo-liberal
globalisation.
Accumulation by dispossession is a multifaceted process that has
involved, inter alia, the commodification and privatisation of land and
the forceful expulsion of peasant populations, the conversion of various
forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusively
private property rights, the expansion of the domain of intellectual
property rights (IPRs) and the suppression of the rights of the com-
mons.27 These processes are evidenced in, for example, the WTO’s
agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) requir-
ing extensive protection of IPRs in the areas of medicine and agriculture,
and IMF and World Bank loan conditionalities mandating the privatisa-
tion of stated owned or commonly held property.
In response to these trends towards the enclosure of the global ‘com-
mons’ (i.e. those shared spaces and forms of property relations that are
not privatised or commodifed) a number of what Karl Polanyi called
‘counter-movements’ have developed. Such movements, Polanyi argued,
emerge spontaneously in response to the chaos and poverty caused by
marketisation and seek to restrain the market through political and

25
Conor Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive? (Cambridge University Press, 2006) 141.
26
David Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction’ (2007) 610 The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 21, 34–35.
27
ibid; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005) 160.

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 6 introduction
institutional change.28 In the era of neo-liberal globalisation such
movements have increasingly become transnational or even ‘global’, both
in terms of their composition and their aims and objectives.29 The
globalisation of communication systems has enabled the sharing of
strategies and the development of alliances between geographically
dispersed movements, facilitating the formation of a vast global ‘set of
networks, initiatives, organisations and movements that fight against the
economic, social, and political outcomes of hegemonic globalisation,
challenge the conceptions of world development underlying the latter,
and propose alternative conceptions’.30

‘NEW RIGHTS ADVOCACY’

The last three decades have also witnessed ‘an increasingly expansive
array of international instances’ that have generated socioeconomic
rights jurisprudence.31 UN human rights bodies, agencies and special
rapporteurs have steadily taken more steps to assist the development
of more rigorous awareness, monitoring and implementation of socio-
economic rights.32 The UN Committee on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights (CESCR) was formed in 1987 to monitor States
Parties’ compliance with their obligations under the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and
has subsequently developed an international jurisprudence attempting
to clarify the content of these rights. The UN Commission on Human
Rights has appointed special rapporteurs on education, food, housing
and highest attainable standard of health. UN agencies such as the
UNDP, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the FAO have

28
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Beacon Press, 1944) 130.
29
Barry K Gills, ‘Introduction: Globalization and the Politics of Resistance’ in Barry K Gills
(ed.), Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Macmillan, 2000) 3–11.
30
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Beyond Neoliberal Governance: The World Social Forum as
Subaltern Politics and Legality’ in Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesar A Rodriguez-
Garivito (eds.), Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality
(Cambridge University Press, 2005) 29.
31
Philip Alston, ‘Foreword’ in Malcolm Langford (ed.), Social Rights Jurisprudence:
Emerging Trends in International and Comparative Law (Cambridge University Press,
2008) 3.
32
Paul J Nelson and Ellen Dorsey, New Rights Advocacy: Changing Strategies of Develop-
ment and Human Rights NGOs (Georgetown University Press, 2008) 45–46.

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 ‘new rights advocacy’ 7
also developed rights-based approaches that incorporate concern for
socioeconomic rights.33
The combination of growing forms of transnational resistance to neo-
liberal globalisation and efforts by international bodies to clarify the
normative content of socioeconomic rights has created the material and
ideational conditions for a global ‘new rights advocacy’ based around the
protection and promotion of socioeconomic rights. Since the 1960s,
international human rights advocacy had been devoted almost exclu-
sively to civil and political rights and such advocacy still remains the
predominant focus of Western human rights NGOs.34 However, from
the mid-1990s advocacy work around socioeconomic rights has become
visible within human rights NGOs which have ‘joined in human rights-
driven social movements for food, health, education, water and other
rights’.35 This movement gained momentum towards the end of the
1990s as the global justice movement began to form and it ‘became
common to hear human rights language associated with criticism of
neoliberal globalization’.36
Over the past two decades, new human rights NGOs have been
founded to focus on specific socioeconomic rights, such as the Food First
Information and Action Network (FIAN) and the Centre on Housing
Rights and Evictions (COHRE).37 National advocacy organisations for
socioeconomic rights have also emerged in Nigeria, Ecuador, New Zea-
land, Canada and many other locations.38 Western Human Rights NGOs
such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights
First, which for decades worked exclusively on civil and political rights,
also began to expand their mandates to encompass a range of socio-
economic rights.39 UN-Sponsored conferences have brought diverse
NGOs and civil society organisations together on the global stage.40
The reaffirmation of the interdependence of all human rights at the
Vienna World Conference in 1993 and subsequent world conferences
in Copenhagen, Johannesburg and elsewhere provided further opportun-
ities to discuss and support socioeconomic rights.41 A number of these

33 34 35
ibid, 46. ibid, 13. ibid, 14.
36
Andrew Lang, World Trade Law after Neoliberalism: Re-Imagining the Global Economic
Order (Oxford University Press, 2011) 81.
37
See www.fian.org/ accessed 21 September 2013; www.cohre.org/ accessed 21 Septem-
ber 2013.
38 39 40
Nelson and Dorsey (n 32) 70–71. ibid, 31. ibid.
41
Daniel PL Chong, Freedom from Poverty: NGOs and Human Rights Praxis (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2010) 159.

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 8 introduction
actors have also converged at other international gatherings such as the
annual World Social Forum (WSF) events, where they raised similar
concerns in relation to globalisation and socioeconomic rights.42
This book examines the role that this ‘new rights advocacy’ can play in
relation to global justice movements that contest the ideologies, insti-
tutions and outcomes of neo-liberal transnational governance. As a
number of scholars and NGO activists have noted, the language of
socioeconomic rights is, in a number of respects, useful for contesting
neo-liberalism. It is argued, for example, that socioeconomic rights imply
certain forms of wealth and resource distribution, place limits on privat-
isation and commodification and challenge the logic of unfettered eco-
nomic rationality.43
Nevertheless, human rights have also come under attack from a number of
sources, and notably from scholars and activists on the political left. It is
argued that human rights, particularly in their legal form, seek only to ensure
minimum levels of protection to the most marginalised and fail to address
structural factors (political, social, cultural, economic, etc.) that produce and
sustain injustice and inequality.44 Thus, Samuel Moyn has described human
rights discourse as ‘a powerless companion in the age of neoliberalism’, ill-
suited and unable to deliver substantive socioeconomic equality.45
Other critics have gone further and argued that human rights discourse
is not only an ineffective tool for contesting neo-liberalism but itself
constitutes part of neo-liberal hegemony.46 Such critics stress the historic

42
Maria Luisa Mendonca, ‘Human Rights: Conference Synthesis on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights’ in William F Fisher and Thomas Ponniah (eds.), Another World Is
Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum (Fernwood,
2003) 309–316.
43
See, e.g., Shareen Hertel and Lanse Minkler, ‘Economic Rights: The Terrain’ in Shareen
Hertel and Lanse Minkler (eds.), Economic Rights: Conceptual, Measurement, and Policy
Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2007) 1; Oriol Mirosa and Leila M Harris, ‘Human
Right to Water: Contemporary Challenges and Contours of a Global Debate’ (2011) 44(3)
Antipode 932, 933; Priscilla Claeys, ‘From Food Sovereignty to Peasants’ Rights: An
Overview of Via Campesina’s Struggle for New Human Rights’ (La Via Campesina,
15 May 2013) 2. http://viacampesina.org/downloads/pdf/openbooks/EN-02.pdf accessed
3 January 2014.
44
Alicia Ely Yamin, ‘The Future in the Mirror: Incorporating Strategies for the Defense and
Promotion of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights into the Mainstream Human Rights
Agenda’ (2005) 27 Human Rights Quarterly 1200, 1221.
45
Samuel Moyn, ‘A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism’
(2014) 77(4) Law and Contemporary Problems 147.
46
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Penguin, 2007)
118–128.

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 global justice movements 9
role of economic liberalism in human rights discourse and its emphasis on
individual appropriation and exclusive ownership of resources at the
expense of equitable redistributive goals.47 Furthermore, the form of
rights discourse – which emphasises the formal equality and abstract
freedom of juridical individuals – not only masks social inequalities but
also makes those inequalities appear natural and legitimate.48
This book adopts neither an uncritical nor a dismissive account of the
potential of human rights discourse for challenging neo-liberal globalisa-
tion. Rather, following Alan Hunt, it will argue that while socioeconomic
rights are neither perfect nor exclusive vehicles for emancipation, they
can nevertheless operate as constituents of a strategy of social transform-
ation when ‘they become part of an emergent “common sense” and are
articulated within social practices’.49

GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENTS

This book bases its assessment of socioeconomic rights upon three case
studies of global justice movements that have engaged the discourse of
socioeconomic rights in their campaigning activity. These movements,
discussed below, are the food sovereignty movement, the access to medi-
cines movement and the water justice movement.
Whilst a number of different case studies could have been chosen,
these three were selected on the basis that they share a number of key
features that make them appropriate for this enquiry. First, all of these
movements can be understood as truly global in nature, spanning every
continent and involving actors and movements ranging from more
formally structured Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) to grass-
roots collectives.
Second, these movements challenge particular regimes associated with
neo-liberal global governance, as well as the values that inform them. In
particular, each of these movements seeks to contest the logic of com-
modification, privatisation or liberalisation in relation to resources that
are essential to human dignity and indeed basic survival.

47
John Charvet and Elisa Kaczynska-Nay, The Liberal Project and Human Rights: The
Theory and Practice of a New World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2008) 11–12.
48
Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, reproduced in Joseph O’Malley (ed.), Marx: Early
Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1993) 28.
49
Alan Hunt, ‘Rights and Social Movements: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies’ (1990) 17(3)
Journal of Law and Society 309, 325.

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 10 introduction
Third, these movements engage substantially with the discourse of
socioeconomic rights, often drawing on standards recognised under
international law.
And finally, all of these movements contain at least significant com-
ponents that are engaged in transformative politics, by which I mean they
are concerned not only with winning piecemeal reforms within the
existing global political-economic structures, but rather seek to funda-
mentally transform and transcend those structures. It is in that sense that
these movements can be understood as potentially counter-hegemonic.

A NEO-GRAMSCIAN FRAMEWORK
In assessing the counter-hegemonic potential of socioeconomic rights
discourse this book will draw theoretical insights from the neo-Gramscian
approach to international relations. The neo-Gramscian framework will
be more fully explained in Chapter 1, but for now it will suffice to note
that, for neo-Gramscians, a hegemonic world order is understood more
broadly than the economic or military preponderance of a powerful state
or states and instead involves ‘a coherent . . . fit between a configuration of
material power, the prevalent collective image of world order (including
certain norms) and a set of institutions which administer the order with a
certain semblance of universality’.50 In other words, hegemony requires
ideological legitimation and at least a degree of consent from some
sections of the subaltern classes.
For neo-Gramscians, the ideological legitimation of neo-liberal global-
isation takes place in the sphere of ‘global civil society’, understood roughly
as the global domain of uncoerced human association and the sets of
relational transnational networks that fill that space.51 Whilst global civil
society is a discursive space that helps to reproduce global hegemony, it is
also viewed as a platform to contest dominant models of globalisation.52
Human rights remain ubiquitous within global civil society today.53 As
already noted, there is disagreement over the counter-hegemonic potential

50
Robert W Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations’
(1981) 10(2) Millennium: Journal of International Studies 126, 139.
51
Michael Walzer, ‘The Civil Society Argument’ in Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of
Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (Phronesis, 1992) 89.
52
Lucy Ford, ‘Challenging Global Environmental Governance: Social Movement Agency
and Global Civil Society’ (2003) 3(2) Global Environmental Politics 120, 129.
53
Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism
(Routledge, 2007) 33.

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 frameworks, discourses and ideologies 11
of human rights discourse. But even assuming that socioeconomic rights is
well-suited as an oppositional vocabulary, a related insight of neo-
Gramscian analysis is that hegemony requires the consent of the governed
and therefore involves various forms of ideological and material com-
promises aimed at incorporating aspects of subaltern demands.54 It is
therefore possible that socioeconomic rights discourse could be interpreted
or recast in such a way that helps to ideologically stabilise neo-liberal
globalisation rather than contest it. The case study chapters will therefore
pay attention to the potential for the appropriation of socioeconomic
rights discourse by social forces involved in the neo-liberal project.

FRAMEWORKS, DISCOURSES AND IDEOLOGIES

This work is concerned with the effectiveness of socioeconomic rights
discourse in contesting neo-liberalism at the global level. At this point
I should clarify exactly what I mean by ‘effectiveness’. Effectiveness in the
context of this book refers to the capacity of socioeconomic rights to be
mobilised as part of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ narrative to contest extant
neo-liberal norms. As such, this book is not primarily concerned with the
effectiveness of socioeconomic rights in achieving material gains, such as
reversals of privatisation, wealth redistribution, trade union rights etc.55
Rather, the focus will largely be on the effectiveness of socioeconomic
rights in contesting neo-liberalism at the level of collective frameworks,
discourses and ideologies, or what might collectively be referred to as ‘the
ideational’ effectiveness of socioeconomic rights. Given this enquiry’s
ideational emphasis it will principally be interpretative/hermeneutic
rather than ‘empirical’ in nature.
The book’s methodology is entirely literature-based, drawing upon
both primary and secondary legal materials as well as scholarship around
the issues of neo-liberalism, globalisation, political-economy and inter-
national relations. Although exclusively literature-based, this form of
research requires analytical engagement with the source material. Such

54
Antonio Gramsci in Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds. and trans.),
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Lawrence and Wishart, 1971)
58–59.
55
I say ‘primarily’ because, as will be spelled out in subsequent chapters, the theoretical
framework of this book eschews any neat compartmentalisation of the material and the
ideational. Nevertheless, the analysis of the book will be skewed towards the ideational in
its focus.

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 12 introduction
an engagement will take the form of what can be loosely termed
‘discourse analysis’. This mode of textual engagement rejects the realist
view of language as ‘simply a means of reflecting or describing the
world’ and instead is premised upon the belief that discourse has central
importance in ‘constructing social life’.56 As Stewart Hall, following
Michel Foucault, put it:
Discourse . . . governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked
about and reasoned about. It also influences how ideas are put into
practice and used to regulate the conduct of others. Just as discourse
‘rules in’ certain ways of talking about a topic, defining an acceptable and
intelligible way to talk, write, or conduct oneself, so also, by definition, it
‘rules out’ and restricts other ways of talking, of conducting ourselves in
relation to the topic or constructing knowledge about it.57

Neo-liberal global governance is mobilised around a number of explicit

and implicit narrative frames – for example, free trade, market rational-
ity, possessive individualism and so on – that are not merely descriptive
of the world, but also prescriptive of how the world ought to be as well as
performatively constructive of it. The effectiveness of socioeconomic
rights discourse will therefore be measured to the extent that it is able
to identify and contest these neo-liberal prescriptions.
This will be assessed in the context of three case studies of global
justice movements that have engaged the language of socioeconomic
rights. Each chapter will follow the same basic structure. They begin
by identifying the political-institutional context of the neo-liberal
global governance regime in question (agriculture, medicines and
water). Following this, what will be termed the ethico-political (i.e.
legitimising) framework of each political-institutional regime will be
considered (‘food security’, ‘IPRs’ and ‘market environmentalism/
water as commodity’, respectively). This legitimising framework will
then be contrasted with alternative ethico-political frameworks articu-
lated by various global justice movements (‘food sovereignty’, ‘access
to medicines’ and ‘water as commons’, respectively). Whilst these
competing discourses are fluid and changing, this book will adopt a
Weberian ‘ideal type’ analysis, whereby a one-sided accentuation of

56
Rosalind Gill, ‘Discourse Analysis’ in Martin W Bauer and George D Gaskell (eds.),
Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound: A Practical Handbook for Social
Research (Sage, 2000) 172.
57
Stewart Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’ in Stewart Hall (ed.), Representations:
Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Sage, 1997) 44.

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 structure of the book 13
key features of each discourse will be unified into more stable con-
structs for comparative analytic purposes.58
It is after establishing this broader context of discursive contestation
that the role of the respective socioeconomic rights (to food, health and
water, respectively) will be considered. Each of the case studies will
document the ways in which global justice movements used the language
of socioeconomic rights in their struggles, how these articulations are
(usually selectively and cautiously) reflected in the statements and juris-
prudence issued by UN human rights bodies, and how key states and
actors within neo-liberal governance have sought to marginalise, water-
down or co-opt these socioeconomic rights discourses.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Chapter 1 introduces the neo-Gramscian framework for analysing global
hegemony and global counter-hegemony within the context of neo-
liberal globalisation. The chapter begins by summarising relevant theor-
ies of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided the analytic
framework for understanding the operation of hegemony in class soci-
eties. Following this, the insights of neo-Gramscians and other critical
globalisation scholars are used to analyse the operation of global hegem-
ony within the contemporary neo-liberal period. The chapter concludes
by assessing the prospects and challenges faced by efforts to build global
justice movements to contest neo-liberal globalisation.
Chapter 2 provides a neo-Gramscian framework for understanding
socioeconomic rights and the role they (could) play in social transform-
ation. This chapter rejects both the metaphysical abstraction associated
with ‘foundationalist’ approaches to human rights and the narrow focus
of legal positivism. Instead, it will adopt a neo-Gramscian-informed
social constructivist framework that understands human rights as neither
rooted in a transcendental morality nor merely as a product of sovereign
legislation, but rather as social forms which emerge in specific historical
contexts. It is argued that human rights are discursively open concepts
and hence cannot be definitively categorised as inherently hegemonic or
counter-hegemonic. Rather, rights are understood as expressions of the
social conflicts and contradictions embedded in social life and therefore
are potentially supportive of very different kinds of social visions and

58
Edward A Shills and Henry A Finch (trans. and ed.) The Methodology of the Social
Sciences (1903–17) (Free Press, 1997) 90.

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 14 introduction
political projects. The chapter will critically evaluate the potential strengths
and weaknesses of socioeconomic rights discourse in contributing to
counter-hegemonic praxis.
Chapter 3 is the first case study chapter. It looks at what is termed ‘the
Food Sovereignty Movement’. This movement developed in opposition
to agricultural liberalisation, embodied in the WTO Agreement on Agri-
culture (AoA), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
and IMF and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programmes.
This campaign has prominently featured FIAN, a German-based NGO
committed to the right to food, and La Via Campesina, an international
peasants movement comprised of small-scale farmers, pastoralists, fish-
erfolk, indigenous peoples and landless peasants. These organisations,
along with a host of other national and international movements, have
coalesced around the ideas of food sovereignty and the right to food. This
chapter critically evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of invoking the
right to food to challenge the global neo-liberal food regime.
Chapter 4 focuses on the ‘access to medicines’ movement. A global
public health movement, spearheaded by HIV/AIDS activists from sub-
Saharan Africa, Brazil and elsewhere in alliance with international organ-
isations such as Médecins Sans Frontiers and the Third World Network,
has mobilised around constitutionally and internationally enshrined
articulations of the right to health to challenge the IPRs of pharmaceut-
ical corporations as protected under the WTO Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement and other regional and
bilateral trade agreements. This chapter critically evaluates the extent to
which appeals to ‘the right to health’ have strengthened the ability of
states in the Global South to not only make greater use of ‘TRIPs
flexibilities’ (e.g. in relation to compulsory licensing and parallel
importing of medicines) but also to push for alternative models of
medical research and development that are orientated towards health
needs rather than the commercial interests of pharmaceutical
corporations.
Chapter 5 examines the Water Justice Movement. For over a decade
social movements from around the world have been resisting the privat-
isation and commercialisation of water, a project pursued by, amongst
others, the World Bank, the World Water Forum and Transnational
Corporations. A global movement has emerged that has challenged
corporate private sector involvement in the supply of water services
and has been arguing for – and putting into practice – alternatives aimed
at being inclusive, participatory, democratic, equitable and sustainable.

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 structure of the book 15
Whilst there is diversity in the water justice movements, they share the
belief that water is a common good and therefore must not be treated as a
private commodity to be bought, sold or traded for profit. The strengths
and pitfalls of this movement engaging the ‘right to water’ in its advocacy
efforts are considered in this chapter.
Finally, this book concludes by reflecting upon these case studies. These
studies, while not identical, all document some common features: global
justice movements using the language of socioeconomic rights in their
struggles; these articulations (usually selectively and cautiously) are
reflected in the statements and jurisprudence issued by UN human rights
bodies, and; key states and actors within neo-liberal governance seeking to
marginalise, water-down or co-opt these socioeconomic rights discourses.
Drawing upon the praxis of the global justice movements discussed
in the case studies, this book concludes by arguing that the dangers of
co-option identified above can be minimised, or at any rate mitigated,
through what will be termed a ‘tripartite model of counter-hegemonic
rights praxis’. This entails global justice movements tailoring socioeco-
nomic rights tactics to three different planes of global civil society: (1)
participation in inter-governmental and other ‘official’ settings primarily
to gain visibility, co-ordinate movement activity and advance incremental
discursive shifts in global governance; (2) strategic alliances with UN
agencies, human rights bodies and special rapporteurs that are marginal-
ised or peripheral to the neo-liberal global order so as to gain legitimacy,
expertise and resources; and (3) connecting socioeconomic rights
standards to counter-hegemonic models of governance within ‘subaltern
counterpublics’ (i.e. transnational spaces outside of the domain of global
officialdom) in order to guard against the co-option and dilution of
oppositional ideologies.

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