ABSTRACT

Re-emerging into the daylight, rubbing tired eyes, exhausted-looking delegates exit a smoke-filled meeting room at the United Nations. It is 1948. At stake, no less than two and a half years into negotiations, was the final round of amendments – 168 in all – with delegates working every day for more than two months in order to finalize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). How dated and naive this invocation of a common humanity and universal values associated with human rights must appear to critics of ‘grand narrative’ ideas and proponents of postmodernism and post-development. And the contemporary era, characterized as it is by ‘regime change’ in Iraq and elsewhere, underscores the tendency more generally of Western interventions to ‘generate seemingly timeless and spaceless versions of sovereignty, rights, the law, and the nation abstracted not only from violence and force, but also from any questioning of geo-political interventions in less developed societies’ (Slater 1997: 64).