Reconciling Discourses on Women’s Rights: Learning from Guatemalan Indigenous Women’s Groups TINE DESTROOPER* Abstract A quick review of feminist scholarship in the field of legal studies shows that a tension between equality and complementarity underlies many debates on the issue of women’s rights. In this article we use the work of a Guatemalan indigenous women’s organization, Kaqla, to revisit this alleged dichotomy. By adopting an actor- centred perspective, we propose a more integrated understanding of several key debates in the field of human rights. In addition, we explore how likely it is that local efforts to reconceptualize women’s rights are upstreamed to transnational normset- ters, and what barriers or facilitating factors exist in this regard. The article has both a descriptive and an explanatory component. The former is based on anthropologic- al fieldwork and describes how Kaqla mainstreams a rights discourse in its work- shops on personal healing, how women come to understand the notion of women’s rights on the basis of it, and what efforts Kaqla undertakes to share this new under- standing with actors in its network. The explanatory component links these findings to theory by exploring a) why Kaqla’s mainstreaming of a rights discourse is particu- larly successful, b) how its emphasis on the notion of complementarity and its effort to reconcile this with the notion of equality speak to several classic debates in the field of human rights, and c) why caution is needed when assuming that new content will automatically travel up- and downstream once it is developed. Despite the fact that new ways to operationalize rights discourses are developed, that new content is arising on the basis of that, and that formal communication mechanisms exist, we found that upstreaming of conceptual information is limited due to the local actors’ perceptions that there is no interest in this on the side of the trans- national actor. Keywords: contextualization; indigenous feminism; localization; human rights networks; reverse standard-setting; upstreaming Introduction Standard-setting in human rights has traditionally been a top-down process, with states concluding treaties which are then implemented on the ground and * Tine Destrooper (tine.destrooper@uantwerpen.be) is a post-doctoral researcher in the Law and Development Research Group of the Law Faculty, a guest professorat the Department of Political Science of the University of Antwerp, and a visiting scholar at New York University Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Her current research is on the localization of human rights, with a regional focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Central America, and she has previously conducted research on women’s rights in post-conflict societies. Journal of Human Rights Practice Vol. 7 | Number 2 | July 2015 | pp. 223 – 245 DOI:10.1093/jhuman/huv008 Advance Access publication June 20, 2015 # The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article-abstract/7/2/223/2190382 by guest on 04 April 2019