Peris Jones

University of Oslo · Norwegian Centre for Human Rights

The shifting landscape of Nairobi has long been shaped by spatial and physical interventions in the name of security. Accumulating in the urban landscape over decades, these endurances from the past have powerful afterlives in contemporary Nairobi.

The opaque deviations of a road construction project through the informal settlement of Mathare generates existential and pragmatic insecurities, as a lived sense of place and plans for the future are literally bulldozed.

The so-called ‘green shift’ poses dilemmas in developing sustainable sources of energy while ensuring the respect and protection of the rights of affected communities. The article seeks to advance understanding of how prevailing conceptualisations of Sustainable Development – as formulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – are constr...

Why do human rights matter to development?• Brief introduction to characteristics of human rights and development• Approach and overview: Multidisciplinarity, Actors, Interests, and Institutions.

The emergence of human rights within development and the evolving relationship was increasingly brought to bear upon key debates and policies over the last couple of decades. This book provides a critically informed, comprehensive and multi-disciplinary entry-level account of this engagement between human rights and development. It is theoreticall...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

The challenges and possibilities associated with rapid urban change represent a dynamic new frontier for human rights. Three central arguments concerning the relationship between urban areas and human rights are made. First, an explicit entry point concerns increasing incorporation of international human rights standards into city governance throug...

In recent years, policy and academic attention has focused increasingly upon the urban context of human rights. Across a dozen informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, for example, a new form of social activism strongly embedded in local context is sprouting rapidly and provides an opportunity to understand better the relationship between the urban...

The chapter examines the impact of child rights reporting in three countries in East Africa: Kenya, Eritrea and Rwanda. Each of the three reports shows to varying degrees how human rights are precariously balanced in light of political and policy imperatives of state leadership and inter-related issues of institutional capacity. Broad consideration...

Nairobi has a complex identity. It is enkare nyorobi (“the place of cool or sweet waters”)— where the Maasai brought, and still bring, their cattle to the city in times of drought,—while the landscape continues to bear some imprints of a segregated and exclusionary outpost of the colonial-era railway town. But it is also a city of arrival, in which...

Security issues imbricate a wide range of fears and agendas in cities of the global north and south. Everyday life experiences in informal settlements reflect, however, not only residents urgent need for enhanced security but that the state is unable (and often unwilling) to provide it. Because approaches are dominated overwhelmingly by a focus on...

Security issues imbricate a wide range of fears and agendas in cities of the global North and South. Everyday life experiences in informal settlements reflect, however, not only residents' urgent need for enhanced security but that the state is unable (and often unwilling) to provide it. Because approaches are dominated overwhelmingly by a focus on...

Human rights and development trends and issues and debates in some countries in Africa

Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs of ending and in recent years are even accelerating amongst young men in informal settlements. Avenues for legal, institutional and civil society redress, nominally expanded in recent years, display an ongoing tendency towards disconnection from the gras...

Local documentation of extra judicial executions of young men in Mathare, Nairobi - a product of an activist-scholar award from the Antipode Foundation

South Africa is a particularly apposite case in imagining the possibilities and problems associated with human rights approaches: here is a country depicted as a global leader in terms of constitutionally enshrined justiciable socioeconomic rights, such as access to health care (Brand and Russell, 2002) but also one where inequality and ill-health...

Review of the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU), Kenya. Norway has provided support to the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU) since 2005. IMLU is a non-governmental organisation that works to prevent torture and to help survivors and their families, as well as to combat extra-judicial executions (EJE) in Kenya. EJE, torture and cruel and degra...

There is a flourishing of collective actors such as vigilante groups, militias and gangs that could be termed uncivil society'. These actors often have a Janus faced' nature and slide between roles as legitimate providers of social services and oppressors of communities. A potent channel for the articulation of grievances of underprivileged youths...

The report is an independent evaluation of the impact and sustainability of the Southern and Eastern African Regional Centre for Women’s Law (SEARCWL) based in Harare, Zimbabwe. The evaluation has been commissioned by the Department for Economic Development, Gender and Governance. The Terms of Reference (TOR) requested the consultants to review whe...

Global access to anti-retroviral medication (ARVs) has increased exponentially in recent years. As a relatively recent phenomenon for the global South, much knowledge is being added, but analysis of 'access' to ARVs remains partial. The main research objective of this article is to gain a fuller picture of the range of forces constituting 'access'...

The article looks at the role of International Labour Organisation Convention 169 (ILO 169) in struggles for indigenous rights. Nepal is a particularly apposite example, where ILO 169 is currently being invoked and contested in a process of political and state restructuring. The article focuses upon one sector, namely, water resources pertaining to...

Regional level responses to HIV/AIDS have become increasingly in vogue. Beyond the symbolism and established truisms associated with regional integration, however, much less is known about the specific substance of regional responses to HIV/AIDS. This article poses the question: what is the contribution of working at a regional level to the respons...

This article examines the contested reception of the Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (“ILO Convention 169“) in Nepal, particularly in the context of current constitutional reform and post-conflict economic development. Compelling evidence suggests that exclusionary political institutions, laws and struct...

The embrace of socio-economic rights in South Africa has featured prominently in scholarship on constitution making, legal jurisprudence and social mobilisation. But the development has attracted critics who claim that this turn to rights has not generated social transformation in practice. This book sets out to assess one part of the puzzle and as...

The book poses and explores questions about the roles of antiretroviral treatment and human rights in the global AIDS epidemic. A novel approach is used, which places treatment and human rights in the context of global debates, national struggles, and, especially, a case study of the lived experiences within a local community in South Africa. Afri...

People who can access drugs have money and connections with influential people. They can simply pick up the phone, speak straight to a doctor, and can bypass queues. When the govern- ment talked about 10,000 on ARV, we were shocked as we didn't know any of these beneficiaries. I must say this caused anger in us. Civil servants are getting it, soldi...

‘Governance’ is ordained in contemporary debate and policy as decisive for overcoming the persistent problems of international development. The Commission for Africa, for example, in its identification of governance as laying no less than ‘at the core of all of Africa’s problems’ (Commission for Africa 2005: 23–5) reconfirms something of a zeitgeis...

Debates concerning democratisation and development increasingly engage with what are termed as ‘human rights-based approaches’. As such, whilst critical accounts are correct in cautioning against Rights-Based Development (RBD) in an era of rampant neo-liberalism and donor-driven agendas, the paper proposes that not only are more progressive and pol...

Universal access to anti-retroviral (ARV) medication for HIV/AIDS is the clarion call of the WHO/UNAIDS 3 by 5 Initiative. Treatment coverage, however, remains highly uneven. This sharpens the question of who exactly is accessing ARVs and whether access is challenging inequality or reinforcing it. Issues of distributive justice have long been debat...

What are the prospects and means of achieving development through a democratic politics of socio-economic rights? Starting from the position that socio-economic rights are as legally and normatively valid as civil and political rights, this anthology explores the politics of acquiring and transforming socio-economic rights in South Africa. The book...

Although global and national strategies to promote a human rights–based approach to HIV/AIDS have been in place for many years, these strategies appear to have had little impact at the local level, where human rights violations are commonplace. In this article, Peris Jones and Farhana Zuberi summarize findings from a recently completed research pro...

If globalisation is the mighty tremor shaking the landscape of the 'project of development', then, in certain regions of the world, hiv/aids is surely its epicentre. Nonetheless, for all the burden of the disease, Western donor policy on hiv/aids still remains largely silent about the provision of anti-retroviral treatment. This paper seeks explana...

This chapter focuses on the effects of ‘downscaling’ for governance and local policy interventions, which proposes the enhancement of spaces of inclusion in cities. It begins by examining the discourse downscaling within the context of the emergence of an ‘entrepreneurial’ city. It then discusses the notion of urban politics and the ways in which c...

The meteoric rise of 'participation' in urban policy is premised upon the supposed benefits it brings in terms of added project 'efficiency', 'sustainability' and even 'empowerment' of participants. Yet, even as participation appears to reach its very zenith, it comes under heightened criticism from a growing chorus of observers. Some critics have...

Executive Summary of Workshop The intention of the Workshop was to contribute to furthering the work undertaken at the ‘Working Together’ 2000 conference by having in-depth analysis and discussions on the application of the Human Rights Approach (henceforth, HRA) to a specific sector -education- and experiences in one particular country- Zambia. Al...

The paper reflects upon the continuing allure of state-building and modernisation in peripheral, `new' states and regions. The central argument is to suggest that our understanding of the conflicts surrounding `nation-building' can be improved upon by looking at one of the most powerful symbols of the neo-colonial, economic and institutional depend...

In recent years community involvement and increasingly social capital have become central themes in debates and policies surrounding urban regeneration. This paper attempts to contribute to these debates by reviewing the role of social capital in the context of a major regeneration initiative, namely the European Union-sponsored Objective One Progr...

With their acute spatial dislocation and racial polarization, South African cities have always offered a great deal of interest for the specialist and non-specialist alike. Arguably, however, this racial ‘uniqueness’ has in fact burdened and restricted analysis of these cities. Alternative insights are needed to fill out the wider picture of urban...

Apartheid's bantustans reflected extreme forms of territorial fragmentation and (neo)colonially-derived dependency. Whilst the bantustans have been dismantled, paradoxically, the imagery of dependency which they came to symbolize has been used recently to characterize other 'nation-building' situations. In order to provide a more thorough account o...

Although majority rule has been achieved in South Africa, the final years of one ‘independent’ bantustan, namely Bophuthatswana, and their aftermath, illustrate the problems of creating a unified identity. Ironically, in the death throes of apartheid, a Pandora's box of ethnic and regionalist claims was opened. Although these claims were tied to th...