Transforming Human Rights through Decolonial Lens

Abstract

This article problematizes the Human Rights conceptualization embodied in the International Human Rights Law corpus. It considers human rights as a Western construct rooted in a particular historical context, located in a specific ideological background and grounded in a concrete socio-cognitive system. Thus, in disregard of features of non-dominant cultures, the mainstream human rights grammar became a discourse of empire. Building on TWAIL and decolonial theory, this article challenges that hegemonic human rights discourse while providing a justification for incorporating other conceptualizations of rights through an inter-epistemic conversation with alternative world-views.