Human Rights Quarterly
Volume 37, Number 1, February 2015
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/human_rights_quarterly/toc/hrq.37.1.html

Who Trusts Local Human Rights Organizations?: Evidence from Three World Regions
James Ron, David Crow
pp. 188-239
Abstract
Local human rights organizations (LHROs) are crucial allies in international efforts to promote human rights. Without support from organized civil society, efforts by transnational human rights reformers would have little effect. Despite their importance, we have little systematic information on the correlates of public trust in LHROs. To fill this gap, we conducted key informant interviews with 233 human rights workers from sixty countries, and then administered a new Human Rights Perceptions Poll to representative public samples in Mexico (n = 2,400), Morocco (n = 1,100), India (n = 1,680), and Colombia (n = 1,699). Our data reveal that popular trust in local rights groups is consistently associated with greater respondent familiarity with the rights discourse, actors, and organizations, along with greater skepticism toward state institutions and agents. The evidence fails to provide consistent, strong support for other commonly held expectations, however, including those about the effects of foreign funding, socioeconomic status, and transnational connections.

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Rethinking Human Rights and Culture Through Female Genital Surgeries
Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko
pp. 107-136
Abstract
The article revisits the relationship between culture and human rights through the analysis of one traditionally condemned cultural practice known in human rights law as female genital mutilation. The analysis draws on anthropological and medical literature and demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary analysis to any inquiry within the area of relationship between culture and human rights. An analogy between the traditional practice of female genital mutilations and the less widely publicized female genital aesthetic surgeries practiced in many Western countries serves as a methodological tool. Laws and attitudes towards both practices are compared, demonstrating many similarities and thus the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut line between a cultural and an a-cultural practice. In this light, human rights’ insistence on condemnation of the practices of the Other exclusively appears as hegemonizing, racializing, and, ultimately, discriminatory in its effects. Some suggestions as to what a more adequate human rights approach could look like are made as well, as the constant necessity for interdisciplinary inquiry in human rights law is emphasized.