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41 Harv. Int'l. L. J. 381 (2000)
How Should Human Rights and Development Respond to Cultural Legitimization of Gender Hierarchy in Developing Countries

handle is hein.journals/hilj41 and id is 387 raw text is: VOLUME 41, NUMBER 2, SPRING 2000 How Should Human Rights and Development Respond to Cultural Legitimization of Gender Hierarchy in Developing Countries? Celestine I. Nyamu* INTRODUCTION Human rights and development are the two fields of international law that have addressed gender and culture in developing countries. Human rights scholars and practitioners have invoked domestic and international human rights standards to eradicate certain Third World' cultural practices, particularly with regard to women. Similarly, the field of development has predominantly treated culture as an obstacle to women's full participation in society. These approaches have high- lighted specific negative cultural practices such as female genital sur- geries. Human rights and development have, however, made minimal contributions to building a dialogue balancing the goals of gender equality and cultural identity. As long-term strategies, the approaches of these two fields are limited in their ability to address forms of gen- der hierarchy that cannot be easily characterized as cultural oppression. In this Article, the specific issue of gender hierarchy in property rela- tions will be used to evaluate and critique the approaches of these two fields. Emerging approaches-as opposed to the conventional ap- proaches-will be used to suggest more effective ways of conceptual- * S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School; LL.M., Harvard Law School, 1995; LL.B. Univ. of Nairobi, 1993; Advocate of the High Court of Kenya. The author thanks Martha Minow, Sally Falk Moore, Joseph Singer, Diane Otto, Ruth Gana Okediji, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Helena Alviar, James Gathii, Antony Anghie, Peter Rosenblum, and Hani Sayed for insightful comments on earlier versions of this Article. She also thanks the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund, Ford Foundation, and the Harvard Law School Graduate Program for valuable financial support during her S.J.D. that made this and other projects possible. 1. For purposes of this Article, I use the term Third World to refer collectively to countries that are usually targeted by development policies of multilateral and bilateral development agen- cies. I have adopted this definition from Sue Ellen Charlton, Development as History and Process, in THE WOMEN, GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT READER 7, 8-9 (Nalini Visvanathan et al. eds., 1997) [hereinafter READER).

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