The Discursive Dissociation of Human Rights and Justice

Meanings of human rights are neither self-evident nor fixed. Instead, they are embedded in specific worldviews and remain contested terrains both in theory and practice. This text explores the juxtaposition of human rights discourse with how it is understood by displaced Afro-Colombian women exercising community leadership in Cali, Colombia. The first part of this chapter takes readers through some of the critical theoretical and strategic paradigms within which human rights have been debated and defined, linking it with perspectives on social movements where struggles for economic, political, and symbolic justice take place. Current community leadership in Colombia is conditioned by different contexts: urban, economic, generation, gender, and ethnic/race. In these women’s case, their leadership is woven from an urban, gender, and ethnic/race approach that is interconnected with their own and learned notions of rights and justice that are not based on the dominant narrative of human rights. In the light of Enrique Dussel’s victims’ community approach, the document analyses the political activism of women community leaders in Cali Colombia as social movements intertwined with other signs and broader networks. To achieve this, the chapter relies on fieldwork and in-depth interviews, narrating both their organisational efforts and their perceptions about their political being in defence of rights for their people and who simultaneously subject themselves to the politicised sphere of meanings of justice in Colombia. Concerning the above, the text shows how the women leaders interpret the prevailing discourse of human rights, embedding itself in a broader campaign on the right to justice from their definitions. Each woman, depending on her biography, location, and current context in the city, is subject to policies that determine her leadership while she takes a particular position facing those policies. This situation leads to the need to take a critical distance from the hegemonic definitions of human rights and locate its own meanings in a politicised environment, subject to debate, recognised as a disputed terrain by the women leaders themselves. This chapter presents alternative local freedom practices that decentralise human rights as the only liberation discourse.