In democratic settings, members of minority groups have recourse to a variety of political tools (for example, lobbying, making campaign contributions) to pursue what they see as their fundamental rights and liberties. Not only do they have numerous tools at their disposal, they have many potential points of entry into the political system (including the legislative, judicial, and executive arenas at both the national and sub-national level). Much less is known, however, about rights mobilization in non-democratic settings. The purpose of this dissertation research, to be conducted by Lynette Chua under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Luker, is to understand why and how members of minority groups mobilize to pursue what they see as their rights in non-democratic settings.
There are two central questions motivating this study. The first is how activists make sense of rights and ultimately decide to become activists. The second is how activists understand rights and how that understanding informs their activities and ideas of success. The research will be conducted in Singapore, an Asian country that resembles a Western democracy on paper but functions differently in substantial ways in practice. The researcher will conduct approximately 90 in-depth interviews with gay activists in Singapore. She will also systematically analyze documents such as activists' writings and state policies and laws.
This study will refine scholarly understanding about the place of rights in less-than-democratic countries and, in the process, illuminate rights mobilization more generally. The findings will advance knowledge regarding the connection between rights and collective action and the connection between individual actions, especially acts of resistance, and collective action with regard to rights.
This study was aimed at gaining a better understanding of how law matters to people striving to achieve social change collectively in societies that, unlike the United States, lack democratic processes and fundamental civil-political rights. It also wanted to find out more about how rights, in particular, matter to the ways in which people living in such societies fight for change, and how those ways differ from or are similar to the situation in the United States. To do so, the study focused on one particular society – Singapore, an Asian country that resembles a Western democracy on paper but functions more like an authoritarian state in reality – chose a particular minority group, gay people, and explored how law played in a role in the manner their activists made sense of their grievances, strategized and implemented plans of action to achieve their goals, and then evaluated the outcomes of their efforts. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with 100 gay activists in Singapore (NSF funding was approved to cover the cost of transcribing these interviews), spent 9 months observing how they carried out activism-related activities and events, and collected documents by and about them spanning two decades, the lifespan of the movement. Based on a systematic analysis of all that information, the study found: Unlike what sociology of law has learned in the United States, law - in the form of legal rights - is neither a strategic nor symbolic resource for these activists. Instead, they regard law as a key source of oppression that obstructs their efforts. The ruling party, in control for the past 45 years, has used law’s power at imposing punishment and delegitimization not only to deter legally, but also to cultivate cultural norms that discourage its people from coming together to agitate for social change, to use rights, and to ask for change in the form of legal rights, which are painted as confrontational and detrimental to their society’s stability and progress. Overall, these activists concentrate on achieving social changes outside formal law, such as gaining acceptance from society at large and from the state to come out, speak out and have their grievances heard, and to organize and assemble more publicly as a group of people who have shared concerns and interests. Hence, rather than turning to the law to aid their cause, gay activists in Singapore resist law through a strategy that involves a precarious balancing act between survival and pushing their cause forward: to survive and "live to fight another day," they try their utmost to abide by the law and the oppressive cultural norms so that they avoid legal sanctions that could lead to the clamp down of their organizations, and demise of the small gains they had accumulated over time, thus reversing all of their hard work; at the same time, to advance their goals, they imperceptibly push the boundaries of those cultural norms - which have the backing of legal sanctions - on what are socially and politically acceptable without changing formal law in the process. These findings, therefore, reveal that the role of law in collective efforts to fight for social change goes beyond that of rights, which are often stymied by the very legal systems set up by the powers in control. It is an important consideration to bear in mind for international agencies and human rights activists who often believe in the ability of rights to achieve justice and equality in societies that lack democratic processes, and thus fundamental civil-political liberties. The reality on the ground may be quite different: it may be that an oppressive legal system has rendered the attainment of rights not only difficult in the legal sense, but also in the cultural sense of being alien, beyond reach, or even unacceptable. It challenges international actors and policy-makers to think about whether rights is the best solution, or whether they can imagine other alternatives.
