LAUSR

Since its establishment, international human rights regime has received heavy criticism: to its content, form and frameworks. Critical approaches to human rights theories usually take three routes: those who argue that human rights are entitlements, independent of factors such as nationalities, sex, race and ethnicity; those that regard human rights as a kind of international law that supports human ‘grievances’; and still those that view human rights as a new form of Western imperialism. Santos’s project mostly takes the third route, further claiming that there is a growing gap between the aspirations of equality and social justice, its reality, and that the existing frameworks will not be able to bridge this gap, unless substantial paradigmatic change takes place. As a book, Towards a New Legal Common Sense is a challenging read. It is both undeniably sophisticated in content and approach and, at the same time, also inspirational in its questions and invitations to rethink existing epistemologies on the global legal order. Santos views law as a tool of domination and, through identifying intersections and interactions, puts forward a possible proposal for change and a new way of relating the world. The main purpose of this project is a call to emphasise on human beings and their needs, and to realign social justice movements towards the achievement and sustenance of such ideals. This book not only critically analyses social, cultural, political and legal frameworks, but also offers possible solutions. The first edition of the book deals with both science and law, but the second edition primarily focuses on law and the crisis it undergoes. The first three chapters of the book are theoretical chapters and discusses the theoretical and historical conceptions of law and modernity. Here he shows how law has failed to take into consideration the modern-day challenges for law and society, and thus failed the promise of justice. Santos positions himself as an ‘oppositional postmodernist’ and calls for an ‘unthinking’ of the modern law. He claims that it is ‘necessary to start from the disjunction between the modernity of the problems and the postmodernity of the possible solutions, and turn such disjunction into the urge to ground theories and practices capable of reinventing social emancipation out of the wrecked emancipatory promises of modernity’ (Santos, 2002, p. 14). Through Chapters Four to Six, Santos discusses the empirical findings of his research. Chapter Four analyses Pasargada law and reveals ‘legal experiences that, because they do not fit the legal modernist canon, are ignored, marginalized, silenced in a word, wasted’ (Santos, 2002, p. xx, Preface). Chapter Five is the longest chapter in the book and discusses law on a global scale. It explores the conceptions of universal human rights and its implications for human rights effectiveness, in light of a ‘diatopical hermeneutics’ and intercultural dialogue. The book offers insights about how to rethink human rights from the perspectives of the victims of colonialism and global capitalism and how the Eurocentric origins of human rights could be a problem for a global conception of human rights. To understand the existing paradigms of law