Transnational Human Rights Advocacy, Clinical Collaborations, and the Political Economies of Accountability: Mapping the Middle
Résumé
Today's world is one of many crosscutting globalizations. As technological (r)evolution(s) and increasing economic integration continue to restructure the global, regional and local political economies of wealth and power, a broad range of actors - states, multilateral institutions, corporations, local and transnational nongovernmental organizations ("N.G.O.s"), academic/activist networks, and social movements - are involved in a variety of efforts aimed at responding or adapting to the challenges and evolving features of a globalized economy. The efforts of some of these actors have led to the emergence of a key arena of engagement in the field of "global governance," where regimes of accountability that would "regulate" or "civilize" economic globalization are shaped and reshaped. Confronted with the specific challenges posed by the globalization of modes of economic production, the fragmentation of international law, the existence and persistence of democratic and regulatory "black holes" in global economic governance, and the unsettled post-Washington Consensus on development amid shifting but persisting structural patterns of global poverty and inequality, many of those actors have sought to ground their action in human rights norms, which have arguably emerged as the hegemonic langue of social justice in the structure of world discursive power. [Article's first paragraph]