International Networks and Human Rights in Indonesia

Abstract

Following Risse and Sikkink, I privilege the point of interaction between local and international campaigns for better access to human rights in my analysis of the socialisation of human rights norms and the establishment of human rights institutions, but in a way that contextualises those interactions within the political context of Indonesia. I begin my attempt to do so with an overview of the shifts in the political terrain in the decades immediately before and after the fall of Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in May 1998, with a view to charting the impact of those shifts on the observance of human rights. I then turn my attention to three particular sectors within human rights advocacy- namely labour rights, women's rights and the right to political self-determination - in order to describe their quite different trajectories, before returning to the broader implications of this analysis for our understanding both of human rights in Indonesia and of human rights change itself.