ABSTRACT
The genealogy of the modern human rights regime suggests that not only were distinctive states engaged in a search for a common humanity, they were also in search of a common modernity. The history of human rights leading up to the current moment continues to annex a history of encounter between industrial and postindustrial modernity of the West and alternative visions of modernity embodied chiefly by the colonized others. Importantly, human rights constitute an axis in a transnational range of social movements. International human rights law provides a sufficiently decentered conception of the political sphere to imagine not only individual rights but increasingly also collective rights. Social movements politicize and humanize the discourse of rights by paying attention to the life spaces of peoples and their everyday struggles. The international regime of human rights law exhibits exactly such a field or network of legal entities.
