Beyond the Universal Declaration

Globalization, as a process of uniform and universal essentialism of customs, culture and forms of exchange, has undergone its fair share of reprisals and threats in the last few decades. The world has moved far beyond the so-called ‘end of history’, which gained currency in the mid-1990s towards the erratic and unpredictable complexities of an increasingly multipolar world. Now, this trend of questioning the Anglo-American preponderance in global politics has received ample attention across disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies such as political economy, international relations, global jurisprudence and so on and so forth. The aim of this study is to situate this emergent discourse in the domain of human rights analysis. While the thrust for studying rights-based approaches is premised on the ‘universal’ and its corollary categories (such as ‘human’), critical investigations might suggest the hegemony of the Global North perspectives couched in these articulations. To bring out this significance, we take recourse to the interdisciplinary domains of literature and political theory. More so, in order to ensure the full-blown assertion and articulation of the voices from the margins, the texts chosen are ones from India’s North-East, which have remained geopolitically liminal even in the politics of the metropole which as scholars hail is a hapless imprint of the global world order.