Legal mobilization occurs “when a desire or want is translated into a demand as an assertion of rights” (McCann 1994, quoting Zemans 1983:700).
A large law and society literature based on this concept of mobilization grew out of influential studies by Scheingold (1974), McCann (1994), and other law and society scholars working largely in American settings.
More recently, the concept of legal mobilization has been applied to Asian settings as well. Writing about Southeast Asia, Lynette J. Chua (2022) describes rights mobilization as a phenomenon that occurs when people “make sense of and express their problems in a language of rights. Co-labouring in groups or working individually, they interpret and adapt rights to fend off attacks, push back restrictions, recoup losses or fight for admission into institutions previously denied to them. They also use rights to empower others to participate in rights mobilisation” (p. 7).The concept of legal mobilization is closely related to legal consciousness, which is the subject of Chapter 4. We might say that legal mobilization is a form of legal consciousness manifesting in actions, words, and thoughts. It can be as simple as interpreting or articulating a problem to a confidante in rights or other legal terms. An individual or group could take up legal mobilization for themselves or do so to benefit others. Of course, legal consciousness is also defined as action and not just cognition, so the two concepts overlap in many ways, and some scholars would even view legal mobilization research as a
subset of legal consciousness research. These two law and society fields, in short, have developed in close proximity to one another with frequent crossovers.
Readers also should note that “rights mobilization” and “legal mobilization” tend to be conflated in the law and society literature. For the most part, law and society scholars use the two concepts interchangeably. However, there may be situations in which the two concepts are not interchangeable, where law is mobilized without specific reference to rights, for example, when using a criminal provision to prosecute somebody; and, in that sense, legal mobilization is arguably the broader of the two.
The degree to which “rights mobilization” and “legal mobilization” become interchangeable depends on the way in which a given scholar conceptualizes “rights” and “law.” As we learned in the Religion and Legal Pluralism chapters (Chapters 1 and 2), different systems of normative ordering - both state and non-state - feature different worldviews and different understandings of people's experiences and interactions with one another, with governments, and with other groups and holders of power. These differing norms can generate distinctive ideas about “rights” and about law itself. They can shape legal consciousness and the mobilization of various forms of law in response to people's problems and grievances - whether couched in terms of rights or not.
The existence of pluralism further suggests that rights can have diverse genealogies. Each normative order offers different pathways for individuals to come to their own appreciation of rights. All contemporary Asian states have formal legal orders, influenced to varying degrees by their histories of precolonial empires and kingdoms, colonial rule, or even armed conflicts. Almost every state has a constitution, maybe different versions over the years, and they enshrine constitutional rights, at least on paper. Internationally, there are peremptory norms, such as prohibitions against torture, genocide, and slavery, that are meant to bind all states, rights treaties ratified by Asian states, such as the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, the only Asian-based regional human rights instrument.* Furthermore, localized customary laws may contain their own systems of rights, although the terminology may vary
The signatories are the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
185 considerably from one society to the next. Law and society scholars have engaged extensively with these multiple normative systems and have recognized that their pluralities and contingencies result in a situation in which rights - and law itself - can mean different things to different people and thus manifest differently.
In short, in law and society studies, the subjects and meanings of legal mobilization and the use of rights are informed by the empirical context. Questions of what rights and law mean are important points to bear in mind as we make our way through this chapter's readings. The readings feature some studies that focus on rights claims as well as other studies in which the research subjects do not explicitly refer to rights but engage the law with reference to other terms as they press for social justice or change.