ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the debate reflects the contest over universal Truth between the liberal capitalism of the “North” and the new economic systems emerging from the non-liberal context of some “Asian” states. It examines the difference between modernity’s egalitarian strategies for change and the transformative strategies from the margins of modernity. The chapter outlines five strategies for transformative intervention in the human rights debates that emerge from rethinking universality as dialogue and struggle. The strategies are rejecting the universalizing knowledge claims of modernity, refusing the hierarchy of the generational development of human rights and insisting on their indivisibility, and replacing the myopic silencing of the language of dualistic alternatives with the consciousness of multiplicities and incommensurabilities. These also include decentering the nation-state in the global community and recognizing the limits of law as a means of transformative change.
