Mostly just getting ready for my trip today, not much insight to report in terms of rights and development. Getting ready to go to Benin is a challenge in packing, but not for the obvious reasons. The question of what to bring is balanced by the knowledge that I can, of course, get most stuff I need there, if I don't remember to bring it. I find packing more about comfort than anything else: what tokens of home will help me on a six-month excursion? Bringing the luxuries actually becomes more important than bringing the basics.

When I was in my 20s I lived a year in Bangladesh, and tried to stay out of the expat zones as much as I could. I looked at the embassy and USAID people, living in relatively luxurious situations and hanging out at the expat clubs, and thought "how can they really know what is going on, if they live that way?" But, as I get older, not unexpectedly I see things differently. I want a bit of comfort, and if I'm to be away from home for a long time I want the trappings of a "normal" life. This is not  less judgmental than I used to be, towards those who want to be comfortable.

Norm Avoidance and Rights-based approaches

I'm finishing an article now on "Headwinds and Tailwinds for the Rights-Based Approach for Development." I'm trying to summarize some of the factors in favor of RBA and some against. In favor are the normative argument that a rights-development link is the "right thing to do"; the still-shaky argument that RBA is more effective than other approaches; the support of the UN and its agencies; and a few other things. Against are institutional inertia (as agencies want to continue "business as usual"; state pressure, from states that don't like being lectured to about human rights; lack of evidence of effectiveness; and traditional sovereignty rules.

One thing this has me thinking about is norm "evasion", as my colleague Zoltan Buzas likes to put it: states that pretend to adhere to letter of international norms, but also try to avoid the spirit of the norm. I think there is a lot of that here: no one wants to say "we oppose a rights-based approach," but there are ways to avoid its spirit. Primarily this means repackaging traditional development approaches as RBA; for example, to continue to emphasize growth in export sectors and repackage this as empowering workers; or to keep with traditional health initiatives and repackage them as guaranteeing "a right to health".

This raises an interesting IR theory question: is it a "norm" if states don't adhere to it? I'm sorting through that, too, right now. How many states have to accept it before its a norm? I realize this isn't a new question, but I do think its one that is getting ignored too much. Most of what I've read is on the systemic level: how do we know the system has accepted a norm? But it rarely asks how many individual states need to adhere...its always about collective data. Keep an eye out for the article, hopefully I'll have some answers by the time I submit it!

Resurrecting the blog

I started this blog as an experiment, to see how it would work...and the answer was, not super-well. Just didn't have enough to say at that time. BUT, I'm going to give it another try! I will be moving to Cotonou, Benin, to teach at the University of Abomey-Calavi and hopefully get some research done as well. Hope to post photos, observations, and other things here as I go along; possibly some in French, but with translations, since a large part of this adventure has the goal of improving my mediocre French language abilities. I have a little less than two weeks before I ship out to Cotonou: I'll post on occasion as I get ready, then start for real once I arrive.