'This is the World: Have Faith': Shelley Wright, International Human Rights, Decolonisation and Globalisation: Becoming Human. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Abstract

In recent critically inclined texts on human rights, we find a desire to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the human rights regime, to consider the colonial origins of international law and to take account of the putative axiom of globalization. This trilogy is often accompanied by an asserted faith (however vestigial) in the human rights regime. In this essay, the author explores the paradox of such a convergence, asking whether such texts (and the one at hand in particular) are unintentionally performing the question which marks the zeitgeist — that is whether human rights law can ever be anything other than imperializing. To the extent that any sensitization of human rights to its h..