Vernacular Rights Cultures

How to decolonise global human rights? How to tell different stories of rights and human rights? This book argues that decolonising global human rights requires an epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific epistemological, ontological and political encounters with rights and human rights, and of the forms of worldmaking that animate the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights in different locations around the globe. It goes beyond critiquing the eurocentrism of global human rights to explore the political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies and gendered political struggles for rights that animate subaltern mobilisations. These subaltern struggles call into being a different sense of justice and citizenship to square the circle between intersectional inequalities, justice, human rights, and open up different possibilities and futures for human rights. On Vernacular Rights Cultures tracks the critical conceptual vocabularies and the gendered subaltern politics of rights and human rights in South Asia.

Vernacular Rights Cultures offers a bold challenge to the dominant epistemologies and political practices of global human rights. It argues that decolonising global human rights calls for a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific encounters with human rights, and of the forms of world-making that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the globe. Through combining ethnographic investigations with political theory and philosophy, it goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights, in order to document and examine the different political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that animate subaltern mobilisations in 'most of the world'. Vernacular Rights Cultures demonstrates that these subaltern struggles call into being different and radical ideas of justice, politics and citizenship, and open up different possibilities and futures for human rights.