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Situating Women’s Rights in Everyday Life: The EMPOWER Women’s Human Rights Report

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Demanding Justice in The Global South

Part of the book series: Development, Justice and Citizenship ((SIID))

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Abstract

This chapter explores why it is that women’s organizations seek to engage rights-based approaches in contexts where activists are conscious of the limitations of human rights activism for delivering meaningful outcomes for women. I explores this puzzle through the example of the Malaysian women’s advocacy group EMPOWER who produced the 2011 Malaysian Women’s Rights Report Equality Under Construction (EMPOWER 2012). EMPOWER (or Persatuan Kesedaran Komuniti Selangor) is a feminist activist non-governmental organization (NGO) engaged in a range of programmes and advocacy activities focusing on issues broadly related to women’s empowerment—including activities such as working to build women’s political participation and supporting poor women working in the informal sector. The economic and political focus of EMPOWER’s grassroots work is reproduced in its advocacy strategy (often undertaken in collaboration with other women’s NGOs) that have focused on issues such as developing a women’s political agenda and, as is discussed in this chapter, developing campaigns and initiatives around women’s human rights and democratic governance in Malaysia more generally (http://empowermalaysia.org/ n.d.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, England, UK

    Juanita Elias

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  1. Juanita Elias
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Correspondence to Juanita Elias .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of York, United Kingdom

    Jean Grugel

  2. Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Jewellord Nem Singh

  3. Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

    Lorenza Fontana

  4. Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Anders Uhlin

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Elias, J. (2017). Situating Women’s Rights in Everyday Life: The EMPOWER Women’s Human Rights Report. In: Grugel, J., Nem Singh, J., Fontana, L., Uhlin, A. (eds) Demanding Justice in The Global South. Development, Justice and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38821-2_6

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