Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2130919 1 1 Human Rights Through Legal Pluralism René Provost and Colleen Sheppard At first glance, human rights and legal pluralism make strange bedfellows. To begin with, they are not conceptual analogs: the first is normative in its essence, capturing a bundle of rights reflecting the interests most fundamental to any human being; the second is conceptual, offering a model of how to construct legal normativity in a society. There are, beyond this distinct nature, further layers of difference which separate rather than unite notions of human rights and legal pluralism, explaining the fact that studies on human rights rarely have embraced a legal pluralism approach and, conversely, that legal pluralistic analysis by and large focuses on norms other than human rights. This book interrogates the chasm that seems to exist between these two notions, to highlight the potential for legal pluralism to bring innovative perspectives to our understanding of human rights, which have become a critical component of modern legal systems. Human rights have experienced momentous growth during the post-World War II era. At the international, state, and local levels, human rights laws, declarations, charters, and covenants have multiplied and endorsed a recurring core of rights and obligations linked to the protection of fundamental human dignity, equality and justice. Nevertheless, there has been a growing concern that simply ratifying or legislating human rights conventions and laws does not lead to the effective enjoyment of human rights in the daily lives of millions of individuals. Legal pluralism offers an approach that translates abstract and broad human rights standards into the vernacular 1 of everyday life, transplanting these norms into ordinary human relations where they can truly achieve their transformative potential. Human rights, in the way that they have been classically captured in legal standards, protect the individual against oppression by the state. Built on the painful experiences of abuses at the hand of governments, human rights thus correspond to a series of obligations imposed upon the state, including either duties to abstain from interfering within a protected zone shielding every individual, or duties to provide everyone with the opportunity to develop and realise their full potential. Human rights have transformed the way in which we conceive of the place of the individual within the community and in relation to the state in a vast array of disciplines, including law, philosophy, politics, sociology, and geography. The published output on human rights over the last five decades has been enormous, but on the whole bound tightly to a notion of human rights that links individuals and groups directly to the state. The community, as an object of study and a locus of normativity, has been largely left out of human rights studies. Legal 1 See Sally Engle Merry’s contribution to this volume.