Keeping the faith in global civil society: Illiberal democracy and the cases of reproductive rights and trafficking

What constitutes global civil society? Are liberal assumptions about the nature of civil society as a realm autonomous from and balancing the power of the state and market transferrable to the global level? Does global civil society necessarily represent and/or result in the promotion of liberal values? These questions guided my dissertation which attempts to challenge dominant liberal conceptualizations of global civil society. To do so, it provides two representative case studies of how domestic and transnational factions of the Religious Right, acting in concert with (or as agents of) the US state, and the political opportunity structures it has provided under conservative regimes, gain access to global policy-making forums through a reframing of international human rights discourses and practices pertaining particularly to women's rights in order to shift them in illiberal directions.;The study investigates the ways liberal international human rights regimes, which are commonly seen as representative of an emerging liberal global civil society separate from and acting as a check on state power, are particularly vulnerable to contestations involving value orientations that challenge liberal conceptions of human rights and liberal feminist conceptions of women's human rights. The concept of women's human rights gained ascendancy in global policy-making through the development of transnational feminist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from the 1970s onward. Such NGOs fit the liberal model of global civil society actors operating separate from state apparatuses to check human rights abuses enabled by states. By the 1990s, however, domestic and transnational Religious Right NGOs began to emerge, with significant financial and ideological state support, to explicitly counter liberal feminist constructions of women's human rights.;The dissertation uses secondary historical studies, primary NGO, governmental, and intergovernmental organization (IGO) documents, and structuralist social movement analysis that focuses on framing through discourse and political opportunity structures and is informed by feminist constructivist approaches in International Relations. My case studies of Religious Right NGOs engaged in pro-family and anti-sex trafficking campaigns under the rubric of women's human rights reveal that: (1) the elasticity of human rights discourse makes it attractive for all manner of political claims by all manner of political groups, including illiberal ones; (2) the entry of the Religious Right as a human rights regime does not fit the prevailing model of global civil society in that it is heavily state-supported financially and ideologically nor does it make its human rights claims on the basis of liberal individualist principles; and, thus, (3) international human rights norms are becoming less the result of some alternative, autonomous, unified, and liberal-progressive "third space" that counters the state and more subject to strong alliances of conservative groups and states.;This dissertation, theoretically and empirically, puts into question assumptions about the necessarily liberalizing nature of global civil society. It does this by uncovering how power operates within global civil society among NGOs as a result of their differential relations to the power of states and how these power differentials enable certain human rights frames to becomes dominant over others.