Decolonial Strategies and Dialogue in the Human Rights Field: A Manifesto

Abstract

Within the horizon of the critique of Eurocentrism, this manifesto presents methods of interpretation that can advance the project of decolonising human rights and creating new Third World discourses. These hermeneutical strategies include the re-contextualisation of human rights theory in the historical horizon of modernity/coloniality; the elaboration of alternative geographies followed by provincialising human rights; deparochialising legal theory and constructing a cosmopolitan jurisprudence; the ‘universalisation’ and ‘globalisation’ of human rights; the transnationalisation of human rights; a re-writing of the history of rights; a becoming of the Other into the Self; the critique of Critical Theory; the adoption of an ethics of emotions as an ethics of human rights; and a dialogue between different traditions and rationalities of human rights. The paper also presents concepts and ideas such as empire/suffering, modernity as crisis, the colonial origins of human rights, postmodernity as an epoch of moral sensibilisation, power/epistemology, and critical dialogue.