The discursive view of human rights, emphasised throughout this book, suggests that human rights must be understood as an ongoing and ever-changing discourse about what it means to be human and about what should comprise the rights of common global citizenship. If this is the case, it is most important to examine the nature of that global dialogue. Who is responsible for maintaining that discourse, who contributes, who does not, and whose voices are the most powerful in defining what is to count as ‘human rights’?

As discussed in Chapter 1, one of the consequences of globalisation has been localisation, and this has led to the identification of the global and the local as the sites of significant change and praxis. For this reason the discussion in this chapter will be divided into a consideration of global and local dialogues around human rights.

The global discourse of human rights

While not wanting to underemphasise the disproportionate role that western voices have had in framing the human rights discourse, it is also clear that this concern is now being vigorously addressed. Even a cursory glance at the human rights literature shows that the issue of cultural relativism and the western domination of the discourse has received substantial attention and that a significant number of non-western writers are now talking about human rights (Schmale 1993; Aziz 1999; Bauer & Bell 1999; Parekh, B. 1999; Van Ness 1999).