ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the dimensions of the postcoloniality and its implications with reference to two examples. The first is the universalization of international law through decolonization, and the second is the limited success of recent attempts to "decolonize" human rights by refounding them on more "truly" universal grounds. The demand for commensurability is produced by the way in which universalization is a definite process that requires a specific form to be universalized but that depends on the paradoxical claim that what is being universalized is already universal. Among postcolonial approaches to international law there have been several attempts to move toward a new concept of human rights, one that is more concordant with the times. In a more self-consciously postcolonial vein, human rights law scholars reveal the hidden sources of positive value in the ostensibly occidental universal values by acknowledging the exchange of values between colonized and colonizer.
