Re-Writing Human Rights: A Non-Historicist Perspective.

Critically important struggles over the 'right' to water between villagers and the Coca-Cola Company in Plachimada, India, suggest that the mainstream legal conceptualization of 'rights' is inadequate for protecting vital human rights in a meaningful way. Such struggles indicate that this inadequacy arises, in part, from the narrow and even misleading historicist accounts of modern human rights as 'unique, unified wholes' in themselves, signifying a radical discontinuity from past struggles for social justice and resistances to oppression. This paper questions the division of the time of human rights into pre and post-UDHR eras in this context. I argue that a departure from the singular linear model of history is necessary in order to realize the immense potential of human rights. A non-historicist history of human rights law, would make it possible to include various struggles for rights that have so far been excluded from the story of human rights. Such accounts, by being more faithful to history from "below" enable a more meaningful investigation of the continuing relevance of human rights law in struggles for rights in many parts of the world today. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]