Epistemic inertia in human rights expert bodies: Continuity amid pluralisation

Felipe Jaramillo Ruiz and Juanita Uribe discuss the key arguments from their new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you'd like to know more you can read the full article here - Epistemic inertia in human rights expert bodies: Continuity amid pluralisation

Introduction

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006, is widely recognised as a landmark in international politics. Hard fought by disability movements and advocates, it helped shift how disability is understood, from a medical problem to a question of rights, inclusion, and social justice. The language of rights, participation, and morality marked a clear departure from earlier frameworks, which portrayed people with disabilities as patients to be ‘cured’.

Given the unprecedented nature of this moment, policy and scholarly debates have overwhelmingly focused on what appears as novelty. This includes the new actors the convention brought in, the emergence of new discourses and rights around disability, and the shift away from earlier technocratic forms of expertise. However, we contend that treating moments of change as solely emancipatory and transformative, particularly in global sites of expertise, can render forms of persistence harder to see. While recognising the Convention as a site of significant transformation, we argue that it simultaneously reproduces dominant (neo)liberal assumptions about what constitutes a ‘normal’ human subject. These dynamics become particularly visible in the expert practices through which the Convention is interpreted and made actionable. We therefore locate our analysis on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the body tasked with translating the Convention into authoritative guidance for states.[1]

To capture what endures within such moments of formal rupture, we propose the heuristic of epistemic inertia, which draws attention to the underlying rationalities and normative assumptions that persist even as rupture is celebrated and the rhetoric, institutional sites, and authorised actors of expertise appear to change. Identifying epistemic inertia requires cultivating an analytical sensibility that entails, first, historicising expert claims, and second, interrogating their normative content (i.e. the visions of ‘normalcy’ and ‘deviance’ that underpin expertise). Our analysis thus focuses on how moments of expert pluralisation can coexist with, and sometimes reproduce, historically dominant ways of knowing that leave prevailing normative assumptions and their associated socio-economic structures intact in key respects. We develop this argument by tracing epistemic inertia across three interrelated dimensions.

Work as the basis of dignity

Across the medical and human rights models of disability, work and employment are positioned as central to human dignity. This framing reinforces the idea that dignity is achieved through independence, self-sufficiency, and economic productivity. While this framing is important to processes of market inclusion, it also narrows the meaning of work to paid employment, excluding caregiving, parenting, and community contributions. In doing so, it sustains a conception of human dignity primarily oriented toward productivity and independence.

Equality through assimilation and merit

Across the medical and human rights models of expertise on disability, ‘inclusion’ is often framed through the language of equal opportunity and merit. At first glance, this appears fair and progressive. Yet it also presupposes that existing systems, such as the labour market, are already neutral and just need to be made more accessible. In practice, this shifts the burden onto individuals to prove their worth within unchanged structures, rather than interrogating whether those structures themselves require transformation.

Market participation as a moral horizon 

Finally, market participation continues to function as a dominant moral horizon of disability governance across both the medical and human rights models. While the shift from a medical to a human rights model changes who speaks and how disability is framed, it does not fundamentally alter what individuals are expected to aspire to. In both frameworks, participation in the labour market remains a key measure of a meaningful life. What remains largely unexamined are alternative ways of organising work and social life, including those grounded in care, collective support, or alternative economic arrangements, which are no less constitutive of a meaningful life.

Conclusion

With the heuristic of epistemic inertia, we seek to draw attention to the continuities of deep-seated normative assumptions in moments often characterised as purely emancipatory in global sites of expertise. Such continuities can coexist with far-reaching transformations in discourses, institutional arrangements, actors, and forms of expertise, and are not mutually exclusive. 

Rather than denying the significance of these changes, our article offers a vocabulary to resist reading them as uniformly progressive across all dimensions. At the same time, it invites a more attentive engagement with the possibilities these transformations hold for opening space toward more inclusive and alternative futures.
 

[1] We focus on its 2022 General Comment on the right to work, and reading it alongside earlier United Nations disability frameworks dating back to the 1970s.

Photo by Davi Mendes on Unsplash