ABSTRACT
Human rights have become a dominant vocabulary to formulate ideals about social justice. However, human rights norms are not static. They travel within and between groups, localities and institutions. For this to happen, they have to be translated, not only in a literal sense, but also in a substantive and cultural sense, to become meaningful. During this process of translation, human rights norms are often – consciously or unconsciously – transformed. These transformations have the capacity to shape the meaning and potential impact of human rights norms. At the same time, the transformations that happen during the translation process are often not neutral, and may reflect global asymmetries between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’. This chapter considers both translations and transformations that take place within the international human rights institutions, as well as those happening on an everyday basis in localities far away from these ‘centres’, as such it foregrounds the actors involved in the process and presents the travel, translation and transformation of human rights norms as a multi-directional, multi-faceted and complex process in which various meanings coexist, intersect and become mutually constitutive. It gives an overview of existing literature on this topic and supplements this with empirical insights from various case studies.
