Legality, information, and the making of the public subject in Africa's human rights capital (The Gambia)

Anthropological examinations of human rights typically conceive of rights and rights claims as primarily legal phenomena often clashing with local cultural traditions. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research in The Gambia in West Africa and at the Gambia-based African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, this study suggests that human rights are best approached as inextricable from a wider set of beliefs and practices concerning information, public discourse, multiculturalism, and citizenship in addition to legal norms. This claim is supported with examples from a number of social domains in The Gambia, including information policy, voter registration, citizenship education, freedom of expression, and women's and children's rights. It is argued that even in the comparatively legalistic domain of the African Commission---a pan-African human rights body empowered to, among other things, address allegations of human rights abuse by African countries---human rights are caught up in normative considerations of information, public discourse, and modes of knowledge. In specific human rights debates, furthermore, it is demonstrated that disagreements do not revolve around a tension between rights and culture, but rather between specific articulations of rights claims and notions of community, leaving a general commitment to human rights intact.; In order to capture how human rights bleed into non-legal debates in The Gambia, this study proposes the notion of a public subject. Rooted in the work of the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as well as his critics and interlocutors, this notion is put forth as an analytic rubric encompassing the claims regarding appropriate civic behavior, commitment to information and modes of knowledge, and attitude to the law and rights that are present in Gambian human rights discussions. By charting how this public subject is produced in various domains in The Gambia, the study not only contributes to our present understanding of the globalization of human rights in specific locales, but also offers an ethnographic examination of the African Commission as a site for the production of this subject.