Introduction to Series: How Human Rights Cities are Leading the Fight for Urban Justice
Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. As national governments retreat from human rights in the face of growing global economic pressures and rising authoritarian ethno-nationalism, municipalities have emerged as a key site and source of social protection for their residents. As a result, cities have been drawn into more direct engagement with global politics. Yet cities face mounting and related human rights challenges of their own: austerity urbanism, aging and inadequate infrastructure, lack of affordable housing, growing hostility to migrants and refugees, and climate change. All of these problems are exacerbated by policy processes outside local control.
Cities as human rights leaders
A global-local human rights movement has grown up in response to these changes and challenges. Municipal leaders, both public officials and civil society and social movement activists, are working together to ensure that residents’ basic needs are met and to create conditions for their flourishing. This movement’s immediate focus is improving municipal compliance with international human rights norms and encouraging local governments and community residents to engage with global human rights processes. By doing this, it seeks to transform local government and global human rights alike.
This movement originated in the Global South around demands for a “right to the city” in the 1990s, demands that spread to Europe and elsewhere as activists sought ways to resist new threats posed by global economic restructuring. The idea of Human Rights Cities was introduced at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and Rosario, Argentina, became the first formal Human Rights City in 1999. Since then, the movement has taken off. Such success is reflected in the United Nations’ increasing engagement with local governments on urgent social and environmental challenges. For instance, the Sustainable Development Goals provide benchmarks to help governments close the gaps between human rights norms and local policies. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has intensified its efforts to deepen partnerships with local and regional governments, as well as with human rights city movements. Another tool, the Human Rights Council’s universal periodic review, offers expanded opportunities for civil society groups to engage in efforts to hold local and national authorities accountable to global human rights norms. Most importantly, cities around the world—from Gwangju, South Korea, to Barcelona, Spain, to Dayton, Ohio—are declaring themselves human rights cities or adopting international human rights treaties. For example, CEDAW cities are adopting the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women as part of their governing structures.
The birth of the Human Rights Cities Alliance
The Human Rights Cities Alliance (HRCA) is a network of human rights advocates and scholar-practitioners working across the United States and Canada to improve local compliance with global human rights norms. We facilitate local engagement with international review processes, educate diverse audiences about how human rights can make a difference locally (e.g., through webinars and community forums), and support local human rights accountability by creating or strengthening municipal institutions and engaging in policy advocacy. The HRCA emerged from several convenings of human rights organizers beginning in 2015, where participants forged lasting connections and shared information, experiences, and knowledge around human rights city organizing.
The focus of the HRCA and its partners is on North America, and particularly (though not exclusively) the United States, where local human rights activism has been less visible and also less studied. We examine the history and political context that affect human rights organizing in this region and consider how global institutions and alliances can strengthen human rights protections in cities across this region and worldwide. Although our network does not (yet) include Mexico, we aim to expand this work across the entire continent to strengthen global and cross-city movements defending human rights from all abusive governments.
Many founding HRCA members were part of the US Human Rights Network, whose “people-centered human rights” framework informs our Statement of Principles. The people-centered approach foregrounds the experiences of the people most directly impacted by human rights violations in our communities, striving for “universality from below.” This approach targets the local authorities most responsible for ensuring that human rights laws are carried out. Intersectionality, taking account of overlapping forms of oppression, is a guiding political commitment and crucial analytical tool, helping to prioritize and frame injustice in ways that promote solidarity by highlighting commonality and connection.
This people-centered strategy resonates with the idea of municipalism: both seek more democratic and participatory local government that is focused on people’s needs, and both prioritize countering the extractive practices and unaccountable power of capitalist states and corporations. Like advocates of co-governance, we have adopted a strategy that involves building authentic power-sharing relationships with local officials to strengthen democracy and improve the lives of people in our communities, even as we strive to build alternative systems.
Embracing a trans-local approach
What makes the human rights cities movement distinct is our explicitly trans-local approach, which uses global human rights laws and accountability mechanisms as levers of local change. We seek to mobilize people locally to engage with municipal governments, and the HRCA serves as a coordination mechanism for strategizing and sharing information. In this way, we can help build movement pressure from below to improve local government performance. By centering global norms and cooperating with other local movements worldwide, we also seek to generate pressure from above while benefiting from and contributing to global human rights discourse.
This “sandwich strategy” can drive change locally and, over time, nationally and even globally. It incorporates and complicates Keck and Sikkink’s boomerang effect by taking into account the multiple levels of government that exist within many states, and the various interests and strategic opportunities they present. Pressure created through appeals to global human rights norms and networks can energize local activism and alter perspectives and policies. Municipal governments, allied or parallel to local human rights movements, might then push national governments for legal changes, institutional reforms, or increased resources to help improve their human rights performance. As these changes percolate up, they begin to reshape global conversations about human rights norms and how to realize them. Meanwhile, growing trans-local activist networks advance this global shift through their interactions with international processes and entities, trans-local knowledge exchange, and solidarity building.
We use the term “human rights globalization” to describe these intersecting pathways of engagement, accountability, and transformation. Human rights globalization provides a normative standard that can orient action at multiple levels of government and society. At the HRCA, we focus primarily on informing and supporting local advocates and municipal leaders while building cross-city learning and action networks. Subsequent essays in this series, authored by activists and scholars involved in the HRCA and its leadership team, address the right to housing, the need for a cross-city and transnational movement to fight racism, efforts reckon with history and difference through collective memory processes, the threats posed by state-preemption of local human rights, and the possibility that cities might take the lead in advocating for a national human rights institution in the United States. A final essay will reflect on cross-cutting themes, lessons, and challenges and consider future avenues for this work.
This article was written by Jackie Smith, Michael Goodhart, and the Human Rights Cities Alliance writers network. It is part of a series in partnership with the Human Rights Cities Alliance. See other articles in this series here.