1 - Introduction

Summary

A just international order and a healthy cosmopolitan discipline of law need to include perspectives that take account of the standpoints, interests, concerns, and beliefs of non-Western people and traditions. The dominant Western scholarly and activist discourses about human rights have developed largely without reference to these other standpoints and traditions. Claims about universality sit uneasily with ignorance of other traditions and parochial or ethnocentric tendencies. The purpose of this book is to take a modest first step towards de-parochializing our juristic canon by making accessible the basic ideas about human rights of four jurists who present distinct “Southern” perspectives.

Francis Deng justifiably claims to interpret and speak for the traditions and culture of his own people, the Ngok Dinka of the Sudan. He argues that traditional Dinka values are basically compatible, in most respects, with the values underlying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and like documents. Dinka culture concretizes, supplements, and sometimes conflicts with those more abstract values in the dynamic context of change involving the constant interaction between “tradition” and “modernization”.

Abdullahi An-Na'im, a Northern Sudanese and a committed Muslim, argues that a “modernist” interpretation of Islam involves ideas, which are for the most part similarly reconcilable with international human rights norms, but that acceptance of such ideas (their internalization within Islamic belief systems) depends far more on conversations and debates within Islam than on cross-cultural dialogue, let alone external attempts at persuasion or imposition.