The pluriverse of human rights: the diversity of struggles for dignity

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part I Human Frontiers -- Chapter 1 Human Rights, Democracy and Development -- Chapter 2 "A Being Who is Not Made to Suffer": On the Difference of the Human and on the Differences of Humans -- Chapter 3 On the Coloniality of Human Rights -- Part II Struggles and Emergences -- Chapter 4 Revisiting the Bhopal Disaster: Times of Violence and Latitudes of Memory -- Chapter 5 Pluralism and the Post-Minority Condition: Reflections on the "Pasmanda Muslim" Discourse in North India -- Chapter 6 Picturing Law, Reform and Sexual Violence: Notes on the Delhi Protests of 2012-2013 -- Chapter 7 Women and Mass Violence in Mozambique during the Late Colonial Period -- Chapter 8 Women's Human Rights, Legal Mobilization and Epistemologies of the South -- Chapter 9 The Power of Racism in Academia: Knowledge Production and Political Disputes -- Chapter 10 The Roma Collective Memory and the Epistemological Limits of Western Historiography -- Chapter 11 Rights, Confinement and Liberation: Rearguard Theory and Freedom of Movements -- Chapter 12 The Mediterranean as the EU Human Rights Boundary -- Conclusion.

The impasse currently affecting human rights as a language used to express struggles for dignity is, to a large extent, a reflection of the epistemological and political exhaustion which blights the global North. Since the global hegemony of human rights as a language for human dignity is nowadays incontrovertible, the question of whether it can be used in a counter-hegemonic sense remains open. Inspired by struggles from all corners of the world that reveal the potential but, above all, the limitations of human rights, this book offers a highly conditional response. The prevailing notion of human rights today, as the hegemonic language of human dignity, can only be resignified on the basis of answers to simple questions: why does so much unjust human suffering exist that is not considered a violation of human rights? Do other languages of human dignity exist in the world? Are these other languages compatible with the language of human rights? Obviously, we can only find satisfactory answers to these questions if we are able to envisage a radical transformation of what is nowadays known as human rights. Herein lies the challenge posed by the Epistemologies of the South: reconciling human rights with the different languages and forms of knowledge born out of struggles for human dignity.