Rights Activism under Political Uncertainty (RightAct)

The RightAct project studies how human rights activists in African countries are responding to shifting political conditions that have allowed authoritarianism to steadily rise. To understand how activists have adapted their advocacy strategies as civic space closes or opens, an international research team has conducted over 200 interviews with rights organizations in the case study countries of Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. Our qualitative analyses show that activists throughout Africa demonstrate resilience as they operate under governments that oscillate between rule-of-law pronouncements and autocratic tendencies. We find that activists in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali have adjusted their strategies, balancing between critiquing the state and engaging in self-censorship, to maintain their advocacy. In Nigeria, we find that women's rights activists have found pathways to advance their agendas through partnerships with government, a tactic influenced by practical considerations such as funding demands, legal frameworks, and international support. Beyond the case studies, our research team is studying how rights are advanced at the global and individual levels. At the global level, our research team is using text analysis to study how activists under authoritarian regimes modify their language when engaging with the international community, as measured through written submissions made to the UN's Human Rights Council. At the individual level, our research team is developing a survey experiment to measure how different communication strategies affect the perceived importance of environmental rights among African populations, probing whether different framings of the climate crisis and visual representations of the crisis can affect public perception and action. Taken together, the different components of this project (the qualitative country case studies, the text analysis of human rights reports to the UN, and the survey experiments) form a cohesive exploration of the intersection between political structures and rights activism. Through these approaches, the project aims to strengthen the capacities of activists and policymakers to foster human rights in Africa amidst a backdrop of political challenges.

The RightAct project aims to advance democratic theorizing and human rights empiricism by examining, first, how activists strategically respond to evolving political conditions and, second, assessing the subsequent impact of those responses on policymakers and the public. Over the past decade, rights activists have had to navigate an increasingly complex political landscape under governments claiming to adhere to electoral democracy and the rule of law while simultaneously enacting autocratic measures aimed at curtailing fundamental freedoms. In this context, the RightAct project will study the strategic adaptations that activists make as they seek to defend threatened rights or expand new rights. The project examines four interlocking questions: (1) How do human rights organizations alter their advocacy strategies (i.e., legislative, juridical, protest) in response to shifting political conditions? (2) How do human rights organizations alter the rhetorical strategies used to make rights-based claims as political conditions evolve? (3) Are certain advocacy or rhetorical strategies more likely to generate public support? (4) Are policymakers more receptive to particular advocacy and rhetorical strategies? These questions are pursued through a multi-method research design that systematically compares the strategies of rights activists operating across a range of domains, namely, traditional civil liberties such as speech and assembly; gender and sexuality rights; and labor and land rights. The research design specifically considers how domestic institutions (e.g., common law vs. civil code) and international epistemic communities (e.g., Commonwealth vs. Francophonie) constitute distinct opportunity structures that condition activists’ strategic choices in countries where the parameters of civic space have oscillated over the past decade -- and its future remains in doubt (Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe).