Political Economy of Women's Rights as Human Rights : Political Economy Approach

In this chapter, we offer the social capabilities based approach to women's rights as human rights. We begin with the standard approach and discuss the universal human rights model before developing the social capabilities approach followed throughout the rest of this chapter. In this chapter, by political economy we mean the classical state and civil society and their interactions. By social economy, we mean the underlying social basis of the political economy including the family structure. Khan (1994 a, b, 1998, and 2007) presents deep democracy as a structure in addition to formal democratic apparatus such that the practice of such democratic life can be reproduced with the basic values intact. Change is not precluded, but all such changes should deepen democracy, not weaken it. Deep democracy in this sense is intimately connected with economic and social justice. We show that the social capabilities approach, women's rights and deep democracy are related in an intimate way