Moroccan Human Rights NGOs’ Reform Work : A Locally-based Advocacy Engaged in Normative Transfers

Résumé En

By analysing the extent to which the expertise developed within transnational human rights networks plays a major role in shaping the content of advocacy at the local level (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Goodale and Merry 2007; Pommerolle and Siméant 2008), we will study the ways in which Moroccan human rights campaigns such as the one on the abolition of the death penalty as well as reform initiatives on topics related to security governance, are shaped according to the normative frameworks mobilised by local experts working in partnership with transnational actors. Assuming that the transnational circulation of normative references has an impact on norm-creation and norm-interpretation processes at the national level (Dezalay and Garth 2002 ; Delpeuch 2006, 2008), we will discuss the “symbolic import-export” (Dezalay, 2004) dynamics at play within these two distinct fields of advocacy. Grounded in international political sociology and discourse analysis, our empirical study will allow us to capture the overlapping local and international normative references as well as the politicization and depoliticization dynamics at play within NGOs’ advocacy work (Catusse and Vairel, 2010; Gaudin et al., 2019).