Public Policy Trajectories on Pluralising Gender, Culture & Citizenship Rights RL Vol XIII No 554 MMXIX

Theoretical undergirding & Public Policy

Trajectories for Pluralising Citizenship Rights, Gender & Culture

Public Lecture Respublica Litereria - RL Vol XIII No 554 MMXIX

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD

Former Chairperson of the AU Anti-Corruption Advisory Board &

Professor of Public Policy & Sustainable Institutional Reforms

https://addisababa.academia.edu/CostyCostantinos

Abstract

The modern conception of citizenship, as a massive voice and influential political concept is largely coupled with the advent of capitalist mode of production and the emergence of the states with distinct political realm. The natural rights of humans announced the concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity and attempts to found the modern nation state constitutionally on the will of the people helped to construct the modern conception of citizenship. Culture is refers to a huge and varied set of mostly intangible aspects of social life and the material objects that are common to that group or society[i]. It is important for shaping social relationships, maintaining and challenging social order, determining how we make sense of the world and our place in it, and in shaping our everyday actions and experiences in society. That gender is a social construct becomes especially apparent when one compares how men and women behave across different cultures, and how in some cultures and societies, other genders exist too. What this suggests is that we learn gender through the process of socialisation.

The lecture brings out the analytical limitations inherent in current gender debate that are enveloped in human relations. Five major areas are discussed: naïve realism, narrowing democratisation of social citizenship rights to terms of not very well considered, social action; inattention to problems of articulation or production of social citizenship rights within locally grounded socio-politics rather than simply as formal or abstract possibilities; ambiguity as to whether women in civil society are agents or objects of change. A nearly exclusive concern in certain mainstreaming perspectives that may retard rather than promote legal empowerment and inadequate treatment of the role of international agencies.

In confronting the imperatives of gender relations, nothing is more challenging for polities than the strategic co-ordination of diverse global and local elements, relations and activities within themselves, nor has anything greater potential for enabling them achieve meaningful gender relations.  Within current projects of political reform, gender relations is either conventionalised or sterilised on terrain of theory and often vacuously formalised on the ground of practice. It enters society and polity in relatively abstract and plain form, yet is expected to land itself to immediate and vital polity's socio-political experience. It suggests itself, seems within reach only to elude, and appears readily practicable only to resist realisation.

Key words: citizenship, civil society, culture, gender, naïve realism, social action, social citizenship rights, legal empowerment     

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See paper here or https://www.academia.edu/39866568/Public_Policy_Trajectories_on_Pluralising_Gender_Culture_and_Citizenship_Rights_RL_Vol_XIII_No_554_MMXIX