ABSTRACT
This chapter encompasses conversations between William Twining and Abdul Paliwala about the submerging of Southern voices in legal scholarship. For Twining, this leads to a need to deparochialise Northern legal scholarship by including Southern perspectives. Twining’s book Human Rights: Southern Voices was an initiative in this process in foregrounding four prominent global human rights scholars. For Paliwala, there is an equal need for Southern scholars to deparochialise themselves – and develop a critical understanding of the ways in which Southern voices can make a distinctive contribution to the global South’s own understanding of human rights and social justice. The challenge is to go beyond the voice of the Southern intellectual to encompass the voices of the Southern subaltern women and men and include perspectives such as Ubuntu and Buen Vivir in order to develop de/anti-colonial perspectives. We end with ideas for extending the original Southern Voices project initiated by Twining.
