Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The African human rights system, activist forces, and international institutions: an introduction
- 2 Conventional conceptions of international human rights institutions
- 3 Conventional conceptions of the African system for the promotion and protection of human and peoples' rights
- 4 The impact of the African system within Nigeria
- 5 The utilization of the African system within South Africa
- 6 Limited deployment of the African system within African states: further evidence and a general evaluation
- 7 Toward an extended measure of IHI effectiveness: a quasi-constructivist perspective
- 8 Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
8 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 The African human rights system, activist forces, and international institutions: an introduction
- 2 Conventional conceptions of international human rights institutions
- 3 Conventional conceptions of the African system for the promotion and protection of human and peoples' rights
- 4 The impact of the African system within Nigeria
- 5 The utilization of the African system within South Africa
- 6 Limited deployment of the African system within African states: further evidence and a general evaluation
- 7 Toward an extended measure of IHI effectiveness: a quasi-constructivist perspective
- 8 Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the interest of clarity, the broad conceptual objectives of this book will be restated here. The first such objective was to show that the African system for the promotion and protection of human and peoples' rights has manifested its most significant domestic promise when creatively deployed by local activist forces in the domestic social struggles that these agents have waged within certain African states (particularly in Nigeria and South Africa). When the African system has been so deployed, it has, under certain broadly specifiable conditions, helped shape the logics of appropriateness and/or conceptions of interest held within key domestic institutions of target states, thereby contributing to the generation of valuable forms of correspondence between the norms of the African system and the thought and action of the relevant domestic institutions. As central an objective of the book is to demonstrate the need for a modest expansion of the conventional optics through which the value/effectiveness of the African system and similar international human rights institutions have hitherto been evaluated. There is a need, it is urged, to reach beyond, without abandoning, the search for and measurement of state compliance as the barometer of the rise or fall in the utility of the African system and other IHIs. Analysis of the African system's more subtle domestic impact therefore formed the bulk of the discussion in the book.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007