Vernacular Rights Cultures

Vernacular Rights Cultures challenges the dominant epistemologies and political practices of global human rights by documenting and examining the different political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that animate subaltern mobilizations in most of the world. It argues that decolonizing global human rights requires a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific encounters with human rights and the forms of world-making that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the globe.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 03 February 2022
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Vernacular Rights Cultures presents a daring challenge to the prevailing epistemologies and political practices of global human rights. It contends that decolonizing global human rights necessitates a rigorous epistemic accounting of the historically and politically contextualized encounters with human rights, as well as the underlying world-making processes that shape the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights across the globe. By integrating ethnographic investigations with political theory and philosophy, Vernacular Rights Cultures goes beyond merely critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights to document and examine the diverse political imaginations, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles that animate subaltern mobilizations in the majority of the world.

Through this comprehensive approach, Vernacular Rights Cultures reveals that these subaltern struggles give rise to distinct and radical notions of justice, politics, and citizenship, thereby opening up alternative possibilities and futures for human rights. This groundbreaking work contributes to our understanding of the complex dynamics and diverse expressions of human rights, challenging us to reimagine the boundaries and possibilities of justice in a world that is increasingly interconnected and complex.

Weight: 432g
Dimension: 161 x 235 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781108832625