Abstract

Considering the critical scenario of the modern international human rights system as an opportunity for a radical reimagination of human rights, in this article, I propose an epistemic-methodological counter-hegemonic approach to human rights through a frontier dialogue between the critical yet constructive interventions of Joaquin Herrera Flores, Sylvia Wynter, Sumi Madhok, and B. Rajagopal. Despite their different geographical and social positionalities, Flores’ Critical Theory, Wynter’s human after Man argument, Madhok’s anti-imperial epistemic justice, and Rajagopal’s Third World Social Movements Approach, all converge on a framework with which to theorise historicising, pluriversal, and concrete knowledges of rights and being human grounded in the situated struggles of subaltern social movements across ‘most of the world’. This pluriversal approach allows for a conceptual production capable of transforming human rights scholarship to unveil the emancipatory potential of human rights beyond the modern imaginary. To this aim, I present my argument in three parts. Firstly, I expose the ethnocentric capitalist rationality of international human rights law and its function in maintaining the violent globalised capitalist system. I then present a literature review of the main elements of Flores’, Wynter’s, Madhok’s and Rajagopal’s aforementioned proposals. Finally, in the third part, using a frontier dialogical approach, I identify the points of confluence between the four theories, analysing how they mutually reinforce each other into an epistemic-methodological approach of human rights as pluriversal subaltern praxis of worldmaking, grounded in diverse ways of being human and knowing rights.