Holding Working Groups on women's rights and agency

We are leading Working Groups, over 50 of them now, with students, journalists, lawyers and researchers from all over the world. We are looking at new, nuanced and multi-dimensional ways of analyzing women’s agency and rights.

SAHR’s governing ethos, that lived realities must dictate how we fight for human rights, also comes in the wake of increasing efforts by human rights organizations to reform their own philosophies.

Rather than attribute these to radically different and stagnant cultures, SAHR believes that we should understand them as products of global, national, and local histories of colonialism, war and global capital. These factors continue to change what individuals experience as their everyday realities.

SAHR is committed to taking seriously what individuals have determined for their lives and livelihoods, their daily realities, and what their life chances should look like, bearing in mind their very real socio-economic and cultural constraints.

We believe people themselves have historically constructed, have been subjects of, and have the power to reform justice, whether on a systemic level or through the everyday strategies and tactics they use to navigate through systemic constraints.

We will continue to draw upon, mobilize, and analyze different forms of scholarly, activist, legal, and human rights knowledge toward new understandings of individual justice.

We acknowledge the participation of students and faculty members from New York University, Columbia, National University of Singapore, School of Oriental and African Studies and Warwick University and others.