The Human Right to Food as a Socio-Discursive Practice

Abstract

In the past, human rights have often been studied as philosophical or legal concepts. In this thesis, Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis is adopted to examine them as social practices, specifically focusing on the human right to food. This is done through a discursive analysis of a corpus of documents drawn from FIAN International, a human rights organization advocating for the human right to food, and La Via Campesina, an international peasant organization which also aims to realize the right to food but is not itself a human rights organization. Findings highlight how each of the organizations define the right to food, and show that these differences are tied to the structure of the organizations themselves. This suggests that human rights organizations such as FIAN are more constrained by their need to balance legitimacy and programmatic visions than are other types of organizations in the struggle for meaningful social change.