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development and vulnerabilities of women (1, 7, 13), Nussbaum’s
account appears to be more promising than Donnelly’s. But the
impression is not the reality. The reality is: the implications of
Nussbaum’s theory track those of Donnelly’s. Donnelly accepts
variations in implementations consistent with local contexts;
Nussbaum calls on state governments to promote capabilities in
context-specific manners (2011: 97-100). Moreover, by supplying
an account that “focuses appropriately on
women’s lives
,” which
entails “examin[ing] real lives in their
material and social
settings”
(2000a: 71; emphasis added), the reader might expect Nussbaum to
give some concrete solutions to women’s concerns, including VAW,
which often come across as after-thought in Donnelly’s
Whiggish-triumphalist account. But this expectation is not borne
out. In fact, the vaunted strength of Nussbaum’s capabilities
approach that rests on bringing to fore the material and social issues,
which “women face because of their sex in more or less every
nation in the world” (4), is weak. The reason is this: what
Nussbaum considers to be marginalized in mainstream human
rights accounts, such as gender poverty and women’s illiteracy and
their correlation to gender-based violence, and the material and
social resources required for addressing these issues, have already
been incorporated into Donnelly’s account. In Donnelly’s unitary
view (2003: 23), “universal” human rights are treated as an
indivisible whole (civil and political rights
and
social, economic,
and cultural rights), not as a menu from which the state may freely
select.
Now it would be wrong to suggest that Nussbaum cannot
deflect this criticism. She may argue that her rival approach
provides a better understanding of what enables women’s
development, which includes the state allocating resources to
address VAW. Unlike the familiar human rights approach that does
not in the main bring to fore the pre-requisites for women’s
development, Nussbaum’s does. Yet Nussbaum hardly delivers on
her promise of advancing a clear line of feminist argument (Ackerly,
