Learning World Culture or Changing It? Human Rights Education and the Police in India RACHEL WAHL This article examines how local law enforcers in India respond to NGO efforts to dis- seminate world culture through human rights education. Law enforcement officers do not merely decouple from human rights discourse by superficially endorsing it. They also go further than infusing rights with local meaning. Officers use the language and logic of human rights to explicitly contest the validity of core rights protections. This reveals how local state agents can resist world culture by using its script to argue against its principles. This study examines the implications of efforts by nongovernmental organi- zations (NGOs) to teach the norms of “world culture” to local law enforcers. I draw from 12 months of fieldwork with police who were participating in human rights education (HRE) in India. If, as scholars attest, modern states express support for human rights, and these values disseminate through education, then police participating in HRE are learning to be modern state actors. Examining how they respond to such education offers an opportunity to observe efforts to diffuse world culture in action. I argue that a process more transformative than what is often described in previous scholarship can occur when world culture spreads through ed- ucation. In this case, local law enforcers do not use human rights discourse officially while their practices remain unchanged, as suggested by the con- cept of decoupling. They also go a step further than “appropriating” the dis- course, a process in which actors make a concept or policy their own by interpreting it in light of local beliefs (Sutton and Levinson 2001). Appropriation is typically described as the opposite of resistance: while appropriation involves making a policy locally meaningful, resistance involves avoiding implementation. The police in this study appropriate human rights language, at times going no further than interpreting rights concepts in terms of their own beliefs. But what makes the current case distinct is that the police also at times explicitly negotiate the meaning of the script when they appropriate it. They use the script’s language and logic to refute its core principles, arguing that Received April 22, 2014; revised January 5, 2015, June 12, 2015, and July 20, 2015; accepted August 3, 2015; electronically published February 29, 2016 Comparative Education Review, vol. 60, no. 2. q 2016 by Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2016/6002-0004$10.00 Comparative Education Review 293