'Vernacular Rights Cultures' Wins Sussex International Theory Prize 2022
'Vernacular Rights Cultures represents an original and powerful intervention in human rights theory and charts new paths for ‘decolonising’ international political thought through an engagement with vernacular rights mobilizations in ‘most of the world’. The book goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights scholarship by foregrounding the epistemic presence of rights in the Global South. Combining extensive ethnographic research with a wide range of political theory, Madhok demonstrates that an engagement with vernacular rights cultures opens ‘different possibilities and futures for rights and human rights’ which ‘call into being a different sense of justice and citizenship’.'
'Vernacular rights cultures tells a different story of human rights. The book moves away from the dominant narrative of universal human rights, based on western history and epistemology, pointing readers towards ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Sumi Madhok complicates the unidirectional account instead, narrating a subaltern story of rights that is foregrounded in ‘struggles and contestations over rights’ in the south Asian context. This attentiveness to the ‘vernacular’ refers to the ways marginalized groups articulate rights claims, and to the political imaginaries and subjectivities that their articulations engender.'
Recipient of the International Studies Association Lee Ann Fujii Book Award 2023: Honorable Mention
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