The cultural dimensions of human rights advocacy in the Asian region

Wendy Brown has commented on the importance of recognising the “interval” between theory and politics, and working in the space between. She advocates refusing the “dichotomy between the local and the global, the national and the transnational, the intellectual and the practical”. Brown’s comments seem particularly apposite for the project of analysing the work of transnational advocacy networks in the Asia-Pacific region. There are significant gaps between the academic debates on human rights, the actual language and protocols of the bodies devoted to ensuring the achievement of basic human rights, and the ways in which these issues are discussed in the media. These issues are compounded in transnational advocacy networks where people must find ways of communicating across differences of language and culture. In this paper, I will consider some case studies of transnational human rights advocacy in the region with a particular focus on strategies for communication between different cultural frames and discourses.