Localizing the Global: A Comparative Study of Women's Human Rights

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This is a comparative study of specific social movements working to improve women's human rights in four sites in India, China, Nigeria, and Peru. The project studies the intersection between the top-down introduction of human rights conceptions and the bottom-up mobilization of these concepts by local actors and movements. The central hypothesis is that local social justice movements do not adopt the human rights framework in its entirety but, instead, negotiate a compromise between global and local frameworks. The central conundrum these translators face is that in order for human rights ideas to become accepted locally, they need to match the ideas about relationships, duties, religion, and state responsibility already in place. On the other hand, the essence of human rights practice is its capacity to redefine the rights and responsibilities of particular individuals and the state. This comparative, ethnographic study of four sites in which transnational human rights approaches to women's rights are being adopted by local organizations will help to identify the mechanisms for diffusion of global culture and will contribute to the rich sociolegal theory of rights and rights consciousness by examining legal mobilization, and provide new insight into the forms of legal pluralism that are produced by the emergence of a global human rights system.