At a time when states are increasingly hostile to the international rights regime, human rights activists have turned to non-state and sub-state actors to begin the implementation of human rights law. This complicates the conventional analysis of relationships between local actors, global norms, and cosmopolitanism.
The contributions in this open access collection examine the "lived realities of human rights" and critically engage with debates on gender, sexuality, localism and cosmopolitanism, weaving insights from multiple disciplines into a broader call for interdisciplinary scholarship informed by practice. Overall, the contributors argue that the power of human rights depends on their ability to be continuously broadened and re-imagined in locales around the world. It is only on this basis that human rights can remain relevant and be effectively used to push local, national and international institutions to put in place structural reforms that advance equity and pluralism in these perilous times.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
Most studies of human rights have been concerned with the
vernacularization of the global - that is, with the making of the
lingua franca of international human rights and its contested adoption at the local scale. We need to be equally concerned with the
globalization of the vernacular - that is, with the legal and political processes whereby local actors, including subaltern groups, introduce modifications and neologisms into the vocabulary and even the grammar of human rights. This volume gives us precisely this type of well-rounded and complex account of human rights. Rather than remaining in the comfort of partial views of the movement, it embraces the messiness of the practice of rights and the possibilities of this transitional moment. And it rekindles our imagination at a time when we need it most.
