Abstract
Sylvanna Falcón’s analysis weaves together a critical history of the UN with antiracist, transnational feminist efforts to promote an intersectional understanding of racism. She argues that the UN conferences on racism, particularly the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, have provided a more open platform for such activism than the better-known women’s conferences due to the decentering (or absence) of powerful core countries such as the United States and the space for discussing intersecting relations of power. Falcón’s archival work, participant observation, and interviews with activists from four countries as well as key decision makers such as Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “alters the feminist narrative about UN-based activism” (p. 8).
The “circuitous” (p. 28) path that Falcón takes her readers on incorporates institutional and activist contexts alongside the Durban process and its predecessors. After the frameworks of the introduction, chapter one reads power “backwards and forwards” (p. 35) by analyzing the hierarchies embedded in the UN’s foundations, such as the Security Council as central veto-player. It also profiles early contestation, including that of elite Latin American women who successfully insisted on women’s incorporation as well as the African American leaders who linked struggles against colonialism and racism. Chapter two focuses on how “UN Citizenship”—of both member states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—is based on economic, social, and cultural capital that does not always advance the agendas of powerful states. This is illustrated with a review of General Assembly resolutions on race beginning in the 1970s, which demonstrates that the Non-Aligned Movement has championed anti-apartheid and anticolonial perspectives despite the resistance of (neo) colonial powers, and that attention to race and gender were on parallel, rather than intersecting, tracks until the 1990s. Falcón finds three “constellations of human rights” operating through NGO advocacy: (1) Western/legal approaches that center individual rights; (2) transnational, decolonial feminist approaches that refuse binaries such as legality/illegality and individual/community; and (3) “social praxis,” the human rights practice that mediates between the modernist and relational ontologies of the first two. A comparison of the 2008 U.S. Treaty Review by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the 2007 passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples demonstrates the mixed results of such praxis. Chapter three moves back in time to the first two World Conferences on Racism (WCARs) in 1978 and 1983 before tracing how activist pressure and UN openness to new issues following the downfall of apartheid resulted in key intersectional gains in the final documents of the 2001 WCAR, which then stalled at the 2009 follow-up conference. Chapter four drills down into the transnational organizing itself. It first situates antiracist feminist activists from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Peru within their different contexts and preparatory processes for Durban. It then shows the power of intersectional mobilization through key documents and hearings from the NGO Forum. In the conclusion, Falcón argues that antiracist feminist engagement in UN conferences has advanced a “new universalism of intersectionality” that undergirds collaborative challenges to deep-seated hierarchies while respecting the contexts of lived experience. Between the subordination of chronology to theme and their different frameworks for analysis, these chapters could be read independently.
This book is an insightful and important addition to work on UN-focused activism. It would have also been fruitful to explore the synergy with other transnational organizing that grew in sophistication and inclusion during the 1990s. Women seeking to “gender the agenda” of the UN’s thematic conferences of the 1990s, including the 1992 Conference on Environment and Development, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights (mentioned here), and the 1994 Conference on Population and Development, developed the mobilizational infrastructure such as the women’s caucus and powerful human rights hearings that were central to efforts in Durban. In terms of the case studies, it would have been interesting to know why Mexico and Peru were chosen over Brazil, whose historical challenges to dominant powers at the UN were also reflected in Durban-related organizing. It proved to be a huge boost to the national movement of Black Brazilian women, who then became key protagonists at the conference (including the conference moderator, Edna Roland).
Despite the often disappointing outcomes of UN World Conferences and their mirroring of geopolitical tensions, Falcón makes a convincing case for their continuing importance as a productive site for activists intent on making global and local change. This book will be a stimulating read for students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, Latin American Studies, and international studies interested in intersectionality, the UN, and transnational social movements.