Central European - 1 years ago

On September 10, CEU President and Rector Shalini Randeria delivered a lecture on “Demographic Panics and the Defense of Human Rights” organized by the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s (RSE) Young Academy of Scotland (YAS) in an event jointly presented with the Council for At-Risk Academics and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. President Randeria’s talk was chaired by Professor Jo Shaw, Salvesen Chair of European Institutions in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh and former director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. It addressed the backlash against liberal democracy and women’s rights by analyzing the instrumentalization of falling birth rates by far-right and conservative ethno-nationalist parties to attack women’s rights, LGBTQI rights and migrants’ rights. Demographic panics are “about anxieties associated with too large or small a population, the optimal reproduction of the “right” kind of families, of regional demographic asymmetries or religious communities in imbalance. With anti-natalist policies being implemented in Africa to curb fertility, while European governments, Japan, south Korea desperately try to increase birth rates, we are in a schizophrenic world where the global boat seems to be regarded as at once too full and too empty,” said Randeria. Using examples from China, Turkey, Hungary, France and the U.S., the lecture highlighted the “soft authoritarian practices” that blur the line between democracy and autocratic regimes, which deploy laws, courts and electoral majorities and laws to violate reproductive rights and women’s bodily autonomy, enshrined 30 years ago in the Final Document of the UN Cairo Conference on Population and Development. She argued that formally democratic and legal means were being used effectively to dismantle minority rights, to redefine the demos or to restrict citizenship rights, as well as to attack women’s reproductive rights.
Shalini Randeria (L) and Jo Shaw (R). Photo by Stewart Attwood. Among the challenges to human rights, Randeria highlighted the effects of a panic regarding depopulation couched in the language of national “demographic security”. Women are thus held responsible for reproducing an ethnically “pure” nation and by their failure to have large families they are blamed for the death of the nation. Pro-natalist or anti-natalist population policies implemented by states have always been colored by eugenic ideas, and impact both the size of  of the nation’s population and define who is seen as belonging to the nation. Issues of minority rights and migration are inextricably intertwined with pro-natalist population policies as well as selectively anti-natalist ones directed at minority communities. She made the point that: “Reproductive governance, whether anti- or pro-natalist, implemented through coercion, propaganda or persuasion, through laws or financial incentives, curtails the autonomy of women to decide whether, when and how many children they would like to bear with whom.” Randeria noted that the once powerful transnational mobilization for women’s rights may have lost political momentum currently due to a shift from political struggles for such rights to professional advocacy NGOs fighting for these in the legal domain. She asked what this shift towards institutionalization, professionalization and juridification implies for the protection of reproductive rights especially in the face of the current serious backlash. Unit: The Office of the President and RectorCategory: NewsImage: Content Priority: Top

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