The Globalization of the Vernacular: Mobilizing, Resisting, and Transforming International Human Rights from Below
Alston, Philip, ed. "Essays in Honor of Sally Merry" (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming)
36 Pages Posted: 13 Sep 2021 Last revised: 6 Dec 2021
Date Written: January 29, 2021
Abstract
The tradition of sociolegal studies – to which Sally Merry made a towering contribution – provides the conceptual and methodological tools to analyze the translation of international human rights into local cultures, which Merry famously called the "vernacularization" process. However, scholars have paid considerably less attention to the process running in the opposite direction, from the local to the global and from the South to the North. Subaltern local actors and their allies not only engage but also contest, transform, and export back to the global arena alternative understandings of those rights.
In this paper, I focus on this less visible, bottom-up view of legal globalization, which I call the "globalization of the vernacular." My aim is to offer a perspective, a way of seeing international human rights from the angle of someone situated at the domestic level, someone who is a native speaker of a vernacular language – meaning a language other than English, a cultural grammar other than liberal modernity, or a communication code other than professional human rights legalese. I begin the paper by outlining this perspective. I then sketch the specific processes through which the vernacular is globalized in human rights practice. I illustrate these processes with evidence from my research on the trajectory of Indigenous peoples’ rights, one of the most active advocacy fields of the last three decades and one that displays with particular clarity the workings of legal globalization from below.
Keywords: globalization, human rights, Indigenous rights, international law
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