To help prevent discrimination, particularly against women and ethnic minorities, policymakers in the United States (US) have written and passed civil rights laws that require employers to address hate or harassment at workplaces. Sometimes, however, the programs that corporate managers create do not actually give workers a full opportunity to resolve their complaints; the programs are, instead, symbolic attempts to comply with federal and state civil rights legislation. Moreover, judges have come to see the mere existence of these programs, inadequate as they are, as evidence that corporations protect workers' rights.
Lauren B. Edelman (1955–2023) and I have approached this problem of how workers achieve their rights by studying it in two very different contexts—Edelman in the US, and me in South Sudan. This essay honors Edelman's body of scholarship by describing what I learned about workers' rights in a context—a new nation emerging from civil war—radically different from the North American corporations and courts that Edelman studied. More personally, I also share what I learned from Edelman—as her student and, later, her professional colleague—about designing and executing a research project and writing up the results for an interdisciplinary audience.
In 2010, I traveled to South Sudan before it became the world's newest country.1 South Sudan was a few months away from its independence from Sudan, a hard-fought prize after one of Africa's longest and deadliest civil wars. My own family had fled Sudan during the early 1980s when I was a boy, as this war was just beginning. Decades later, I arrived in South Sudan as a lawyer and a professor seeking to understand what the law, especially human rights law, looked like at the moment of a nation's founding. Where was the law, who was creating and using it, and how did it matter in the transition to political independence?
When I arrived in Juba, South Sudan's capital city, I found that many courthouses were still under construction. There were also just a few lawyers in a nation about the same size as France. Not far from the government's construction sites, it was hard to miss the dozens of other buildings dotting the city, each safely ensconced within its own walled compound. Inside each of these guarded compounds was the local office of a non-governmental organization (NGO), typically an established aid group whose global headquarters was far away in Europe or North America.
These international NGOs operating in South Sudan had varying goals like promoting the rule of law, protecting children's rights, building literacy, advocating for peace, or drafting legislation to hold national elections or encourage foreign investment. Staff who worked in these organizations shared a desire to build up the new nation's capacity to commit to democracy and protect human rights. With financial support from United Nations agencies and other aid groups, foreign managers in these off
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