Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the intercultural reconstruction of human rights

Abstract

This article intends to elaborate an introduction to the thought of the portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos in matters of Law and, concretely, to his proposal of human rights as interculturality. With the purpose of covering this subject matter, we will study the concepts that acquire a fundamental role inside of what the author calls the reconstruction of the concept of human rights, for which it is necessary the analysis of the notions of Law and globalization, and the reformulation that Sousa makes of them in his work. Our study focuses on the perspective of human rights as an anti-hegemonic speech, contrary to the liberal speech that they have adopted since their creation, in order to build a critical and emancipatory concept of Law inside the context of globalization.