By Katherine Taylor and Our Campus Staff

After a week of teaching a full load, hosting a guest speaker, and attending numerous meetings with faculty and administrators across campus, University of Texas law professor and Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice director Karen Engle met me at her office in casual clothes, saying she was in need of a “blue jeans” day. Judging from her office strewn with thumbed-through and heavily annotated books, articles and human rights journals, her point was well taken. Also evident was her ability to be a productive scholar in spite of numerous other responsibilities.

Photo by Shiyam Galyon

Fulbright Specialist Award

To step up her already hectic day-to-day schedule, Engle earned a Fulbright Specialist Award that took her in August to the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where she worked with the law school’s faculty and students. Engle was placed at Los Andes because of her prior research in Colombia and her expertise in teaching academic writing to law and doctoral students.  One of her responsibilities during her two-week stay was to co-teach, with a Colombian professor, a writing workshop to help doctoral students articulate and defend the arguments in their
dissertations.

The accomplished and refreshingly humble Engle said it “was as much about them [the doctoral program] getting the award [by writing a successful application for the Fulbright on their side] as it was about me being chosen as the senior specialist to go there.”

International Indigenous and Afro-descendant Rights Movements

The trip to Colombia also provided Engle with an opportunity to present a public talk at the university on a chapter of her recently completed book, “The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy.” The book, published by Duke University Press, traces the development and strategies of international indigenous rights advocacy from the 1970s.  It considers some of the successes of the advocacy, particularly that centered around the right to culture, but also considers some of the unintended consequences of those successes.

Two of the book’s chapters turn from indigenous rights movements to Afro-descendant land rights movements in Colombia, which in many ways borrow from the model of
indigenous advocacy. Engle’s lecture, “La promesa esquiva de desarrollo para las comunidades afrodescendientes: El futuro de ley 70” (“The Elusive Promise of Afro-descendant Development: The Future of Law 70”), framed the larger book project but focused on her field research with an Afro-Colombian community in the Caribbean that is attempting to use a Colombian law—passed in the early 1990s, primarily for Afro-descendants in the country’s Pacific region—to claim collective title to a portion of an island they have occupied and worked on for decades.  Though this law has progressive roots, aimed at the historcal exclusion and lack of recognition of Afro-descendants in Colombia, Engle calls attention to ways in which it has not and perhaps cannot live up to some of its promises.

Engle questioned in the talk, as she does in the book, whether recognition and even land title under the law would respond either to the larger economic and development needs of the community or to the vast structural racism in the region more generally.

As the Duke University Press’ website explains: “Following the aspirations for and disappointments in this law, Engle cautions advocates for marginalized communities against learning the wrong lessons from the recent struggles of indigenous peoples at the international level.”

Joshua Clark, now a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, was Engle’s student, research assistant and intern at the Rapoport Center. “With ‘The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development,’ Karen has produced a model for what a critically informed, yet immanently useful mode of scholarly engagement with international human rights could look like,” Clark said. “She challenges fellow academics to put the best of their critical and theoretical resources to a test: let them be called on to confront, be applied to, and even fundamentally remake that most daunting and powerful of domains: the law.  It is an ambitious and courageous work.”

Women’s Human Rights Movement

In her next book, Engle plans to bring this focus on the unintended consequences of the successes of social movements to the women’s human rights movement.  The theme is not new to her.

In 1988, when Engle was a student at Harvard Law School, she co-organized the first women’s human rights academic conference at a time when she said “women’s rights didn’t flow naturally from people’s mouths.” She said mainstream human rights groups did not see women’s rights as issues that they should resolve or even address. In the two decades since then, Engle said much has changed: “Women’s rights have in many ways become ‘mainstreamed’— as the UN puts it — into the international human rights movement.”

Feminists have achieved considerable success in the international criminal law realm,  having rape and other forms of sexual violence recognized as crimes against humanity, war crimes and even genocide. This success, however, has not all necessarily been for the better, Engle said.

Engle hopes to “take advantage of hindsight” to consider some of the unintended consequences of the movement in her book. As with the right to culture in indigenous rights advocacy, she wants to look at the many issues that are “displaced or deferred” by the focus of much of women’s human rights advocacy on sexual violence against women.  She also worries about the stereotyped images of women it reinforces:  “It often deprives women of sexual, political and military agency.”  Engle expects the book to create controversy, but believes that is good. It is important to think critically about advocacy, she said.

“Feminists don’t fight enough these days,” Engle said. “Human rights is a site for struggle … instead of suppressing the differences … it needs to be struggled with.”

Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice

In 2004, Engle became the founding director of the law school’s Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, where academics and advocacy intersect. The center is the focal point for critical, interdisciplinary human rights work on campus, she said.

“The center fosters a relationship between scholars and advocates to keep each from becoming too married to a particular strategy or idea,” Engle said.

Over the past six years, the center has financially supported numerous law students in human rights advocacy and service learning projects,  helped begin two human rights concentrations on campus, supported undergraduate work on human rights through the Human Rights Advisory Council and internships with the center, sponsored and organized six annual conferences, and hosted dozens of speakers.

Engle refused to take too much credit for the center to which she clearly dedicates much of her energy.

“It is collaboration that makes the center run,” she said, pointing to the list of nearly 90 affiliated faculty across campus and the institutes and centers co-sponsoring  the center’s annual conference this year.