Hierarchy, Inequality, and the Making of Human Rights: Rethinking Normative Power in the Global Order

This paper reconceptualizes hierarchy as a constitutive force of the international human rights regime rather than a residual feature of interstate politics. Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and critical legal scholarship, it argues that hierarchy permeates the material, normative, epistemic, symbolic, and institutional dimensions of international law, shaping who defines rights, whose claims are legitimized, and which subjects, harms, and forms of vulnerability are rendered visible or excluded. By proposing an integrated typology of five hierarchies, the article shows how law actively produces distinctions of authority, recognition, and subjectivity, mediating the translation of lived precarity into legal protection. From the liberal-individualist foundations of early rights instruments to the marginalization of collective, ecological, and intersectional claims, hierarchy structures the grammar of universality and the differential recognition of vulnerability across scales. International law's architecture not only mirrors inequality but reproduces it through classificatory mechanisms that privilege dominant epistemologies while silencing relational and slow-onset forms of harm. Moving beyond critique, the paper advances a reconstructive framework grounded in epistemic pluralism, relational justice, and decolonial engagement, reframing universality as a dialogical and historically situated process of co-creation.