Transforming Human Rights through Decolonial Lens
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17561/tahrj.v15.5818Keywords:
human rights, eurocentrism, decoloniality, alternative epistemologies, Ingigenous peoples, developmentAbstract
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.
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