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Paper short abstract

When many people do not trust or use formal legal systems, how can law meaningfully respond to gender-based violence? This paper uses a Human Rights Education project in rural Zambia to examine how lived practices of justice interact with, diverge from, and potentially reshape legal frameworks.

Paper long abstract

This paper applies a “Living Rights” framework (Hanson & Nieuwenhuys 2013) to an ongoing Human Rights Education (HRE) project addressing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in rural Zambia to examine what this approach reveals about the relationship between lived experiences of justice and formal legal frameworks.

Living Rights theory conceptualizes rights as emerging from the often unstable tension between everyday moral practice and legal codification. The paper asks how this tension is articulated in contexts where courts are weak, trust in formal justice is limited, and many conflicts – particularly those involving gender and violence – can be addressed through customary or community-based mechanisms.

Undertaken with two Zambian grassroots organizations, the project examines participatory HRE as a methodological site through which this tension becomes visible. Building on previous work by Ben Cislaghi (2018) on HRE, social norm change, and gender norms, the project invites community members to reflect on entitlement, harm, and accountability in relation to SGBV. This is especially significant given the cultural taboos surrounding gender, sexuality, and violence, which often limit legal reporting and open discussion. By engaging these issues at the level of values and social norms, HRE makes visible how ideas of justice are negotiated and reworked in everyday life, within and outside the formal legal system.

Viewed through a Living Rights lens, the study examines how formal law, gender norms, and violence intersect in practice, and how gaps between legal categories and lived experience impact anti-gender backlash and democratic backsliding.