‘Politics of resistance: the emergence, development and effects of the human rights movement in Argentina’

MERCEDES BARROS

Colchester, Reino Unido

Conferencia; Fifth Essex Graduate Conference in Political Theory; 2004

University of Essex

The aim of this paper will be to analyse the emergence and development of the human rights movement and discourse in Argentina as a way of exploring a new form of popular participation in the country and of grasping the long and lasting effects it produced in society. To do this then, I will first look at the process of emergence of this new movement, putting special attention to the conditions of possibility of such emergence, particularly to the availability of the human rights discourse. I will then go on to explain how this new political movement articulated a new conception of rights that entailed a new relationship among the people, the law and the place of power and which would actually very much inform the post-dictatorship understanding of democracy. Finally, I will conclude by showing how this new human rights movement inaugurated a new and an irreducible form of popular participation with distinctive political strategies upon which different and later forms of popular protests would be drawn