“Discourse theory and the study of the human rights discourse in Argentina”

MERCEDES BARROS

Colchester, Reino Unido

Taller; Human Rights Postgraduate Research Forum; 2001

Human Rights Centre, University of Essex

There is a vast literature on the human rights movement and discourse in Argentina. As I have shown elsewhere, most of this literature is written from a socio-political perspective and presents a poor theoretical elaboration. The focus of these writings has been generally the sociological and political implications of the human rights movement in the Argentine society, either during dictatorship or under the democratic regime. As I explained before, this literature understands the emergence of the human rights movement and discourse as a direct response to the nature of the repression carried out by the last military dictatorship during the 1970s. Through different manners, these writings explain that the sheer scope and scale of repression led the relatives of the victims of state terrorism to generate an autonomous movement of resistance and struggle which main purpose was the defence of the rights of the person, inaugurating in this manner a new discourse of human rights in Argentina. However, as I also made clear, these approaches have not been able to provide a convincing account about how the emergence of the mobilisation around human rights has happened, how the new discourse of rights was possible. There is a lack of explanation about when and how the groups of the relatives articulated a discourse of human rights and become then a human rights movement. These interpretations then, fail to give an account of the conditions that made possible the emergence of the human rights claims in the country. Thus, bearing in mind this failure, my aim in this paper will be to show how a discourse analysis approach can provide us with the means for an alternative understanding of the emergence of the human rights discourse. For this, I will start by explaining the underlying assumptions of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse, as well as its basic concepts and main logics. Having explained that, I will turn to evaluate the contributions this approach could bring to my research.