Viewing international concepts through local eyes: activist understandings of human rights in Botswana and South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human rights are an increasingly common language of advocacy for civil society organisations, but are these groups using the same words to mean different things? Although the spread of human rights has been well examined, little attention has been paid to the content of these rights as understood by civil society actors in diverse settings. Focusing on this gap in the literature, this paper examines how personnel in human rights-based non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Botswana and neighbouring South Africa perceive human rights. Drawing on interview-based case studies of two human rights-based organisations operating at the national level, I analyse how activists draw on domestic context to interpret human rights. This paper argues that personnel in these NGOs understand and articulate human rights in distinct ways that are shaped by and responsive to the contexts in which they live and work. Emerging from a more homogenous consensus-based culture, Botswana respondents are more likely to integrate cultural concepts, emphasise inclusion and understand human rights as timeless and innate. Reflecting South Africa’s progressive constitution, unequal society and a history of struggle, South African respondents highlight contrast, agency, change over time and the law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".