Human Rights and Transnational Culture: Regulating Gender Violence through Global Law

In the current era of human rights activism, the global production of human rights approaches to violence against women generates a wide variety of localization processes. Activists translate between global discourses and local contexts and meanings. Culture is conceptualized in quite different and sometimes contradictory ways in this process. Essentialized ideas of culture inhibit recognition of the potential contributions of local cultural practices and provide justifications for groups to resist these changes. This article shows, with reference to a case study of Fiji, that a more anthropological conception of culture provides a better picture of the localization process and foregrounds the role of activists who translate between global human rights ideas and local grievances.