17 - Human Rights Testimony in a Different Pitch

Summary

In exploring dialogue and performance in human rights practice, this chapter examines case studies of human rights testimony that arose from the author’s grassroots economic and social rights advocacy in Ghana over the last 15 years. The first case studies take place in an informal community in the center of Accra, the nation’s capital, in 2003–2004, while the second takes place in a village in Ghana’s Eastern Region that has been disrupted by the extraction of off-shore oil since 2010. The chapter traces the emergence of individual and political economic and social rights consciousness among people in both situations (structural adjustment and foreign investment) in the context of exposure to human rights rhetoric, methods and organizing. In the face of rights-skepticism, the chapter explores how a more politicized, collaborative form of testimony could challenge structural injustice.