1 Ambedkar and Du Bois on Pursuing Rights Protections Globally Luis Cabrera Griffith University / l.cabrera@griffith.edu.au Therefore, Peoples of the World, we American Negroes appeal to you … No nation is so great that the world can afford to let it continue to be deliberately unjust, cruel and unfair toward its own citizens. – W.E.B. Du Bois/NAACP, 1947 1 The world owes a duty to the Untouchables as it does to all suppressed people to break their shackles and to set them free. – B.R. Ambedkar, 1943 2 In this era of populism and nativism, when battles for some of the most basic principles of rights and social equality must seemingly be re-fought daily, it may feel as though there is little space left for considerations of global justice, much less global institutional development. Yet, some of the most prominent historic champions of those most basic principles of equality and rights have looked beyond the state for support in promoting them within. In so doing, they have indicated an important global institutional imaginary—a multi-level set of political institutions capable of backing individual rights protections domestically, and of giving those facing domestic repression some meaningful place to turn. Such an imaginary is well worth upholding as an alternative vision of political institutions, and it can be of practical use in guiding some current political struggles. This essay focuses on institutional alternatives indicated by B.R. Ambedkar and W.E.B. Du Bois. Both are renowned as campaigners for domestic equality, as significant social and political thinkers, and as pathbreakers in their ascribed domestic race and caste categories. Du Bois was the first African-American to earn a PhD at Harvard, in 1895. Ambedkar was the first Dalit (formerly ‘untouchables’) overall to earn a PhD, completing his at Columbia in 1927.