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

From Anarchy to Asymmetry: Hierarchy in Global Political Thought

In classical and modern political thought, anarchy, defined as the absence of central authority, has long been used to characterize international relations, from Hobbes's (1651) chaotic state of nature to Kant's (1795) ideal of perpetual peace. These ideas shaped structural realism in the twentieth century (Fearon, 1995; Waltz, 1979), which viewed the international system as power-driven and ordered by balancing logics. Later, constructivists like Wendt (1992, 1999) reframed anarchy as socially constructed, dependent on norms and identities developed through interaction. This paved the way for theories recognizing hierarchy as a constitutive rather than exceptional feature of global order (Donnelly, 2007; Lake, 2009; Zarakol, 2017).

While these contributions have largely emerged from international relations theory, a parallel body of scholarship in international law has interrogated how hierarchy is embedded in legal norms, institutions, and epistemologies. In contrast to this focus on geopolitical and structural dynamics between states, critical legal scholars examine how legal regimes themselves reproduce inequality through norm selection, subject formation, and epistemic exclusion. Feminist, postcolonial, and TWAIL scholars have deepened this analysis by showing that domination transcends state boundaries and operates through race, gender, class, and coloniality within legal and political orders (Adler-Nissen, 2013; Crenshaw, 1989; Fraser, 1997; Tickner, 1997). Furthermore, national political economies often mirror global hierarchies, reflecting broader dynamics of structural power (Strange, 1988).

Within legal thought, vulnerability theory has emerged as a key lens for understanding how structural inequality is obscured by dominant legal frameworks. While Lajeunesse (2025) argues that vulnerability is a dynamic process involving intrinsic factors, situational elements and relational dynamics influenced by law, politics, and the media, Fineman (2017) argues that legal frameworks often obscure embedded inequalities by privileging autonomy over responsiveness. Koivunen et al. (2018) and Theilen (2024) similarly critique the law's inability to address intersecting harms, while Jovanović (2012) adds that the liberal conception of the subject prevents recognition of communities as rights holders, reinforcing a normative bias toward the autonomous, individual, Western legal subject.

Taken together, these approaches suggest that vulnerability is not merely a social condition awaiting legal protection, but a phenomenon filtered through hierarchical legal logics that determine which forms of exposure to harm become legally cognizable and which remain structurally ignored. Hierarchy thus operates as a mediating structure between lived precarity and legal recognition. This conceptual exclusion is not merely theoretical: it translates into legal invisibility. As Bisaz (2012) highlights, the subjectivity of groups, especially those tied to land, collective identity, or non-Western legal systems, remains deeply contested in international law. These exclusions point to a persistent epistemic rigidity, where relational and collective personhood struggles to gain legal recognition. The construction of legal universality thus reflects not a neutral abstraction, but the sedimentation of historical power asymmetries.

Norm Production and Epistemic Exclusion in International Law

Hierarchy in international law operates not only as a structural condition but also as a normative and epistemic mechanism, privileging certain rights, vocabularies, and legal traditions over others. This stratification has shaped international human rights law since its inception.

The drafting of the UDHR in the 1940s exemplifies this dynamic. Proposals from socialist, non-Western, and colonized states advocating for collective rights and cultural identity were often rejected or reframed in liberal-individualist terms (Blake, 2016; Vrdoljak, 2014). These exclusions were not accidental but foundational, structuring which forms of harm and identity remain intelligible in law. As Lenzerini (2016) argues, this foundational exclusion of cultural and spiritual conceptions of personhood results in a structural asymmetry that persists today, where rights related to identity, language, and land are systematically treated as secondary. For instance, the right to cultural identity, while symbolically recognized in instruments like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), lacks binding force or clear enforcement mechanisms in most international forums.

In response, critical scholars have called for epistemic pluralism. Bhuta (2012) proposes the identification of “common grounds” through comparative historical engagement rather than prescriptive universalism. Similarly, Santos (2015) calls for an “epistemology of the South” that values suppressed legal ontologies and challenges the unidirectional flow of legal knowledge. This includes recognizing juridical forms embedded in oral traditions, cosmologies of reciprocity, and relational understandings of territory, often absent from codified human rights law.

Norms, as Finnemore (1996) reminds us, are never neutral. They circulate through mechanisms of prestige, conditionality, and institutional authority that reproduce global hierarchies. This has concrete implications for legal subjectivity regarding who gets to speak the language of rights, which claims are legitimized, and how vulnerability is conceptualized. Hierarchy thus shapes not only norm production, but the very grammar through which vulnerability is defined, ranked, and institutionalized in international law. In this regard, emerging scholarship interrogates the shifting meaning of vulnerability in international law. Rather than viewing it as a static or protective category, many authors argue that vulnerability should be understood as a relational, structural, and historically situated condition (Lajeunesse, 2025; Mayrhofer et al., 2025; Polymenopoulou, 2016; Syroid and Fomina, 2023).

Yet even today, international legal forums remain unequally accessible to collective actors, reproducing asymmetries in visibility and legitimacy. The limited procedural standing of Indigenous peoples and cultural communities in international fora exemplifies the legal reproduction of epistemic hierarchies (Bisaz, 2012; Lenzerini, 2016).

Taken together, these insights bridge international relations theory and legal sociology, offering a framework for analyzing how global inequality is embedded, not only in material relations, but in the very production of international legal norms. Understanding hierarchy in this context means confronting the normative architectures that silence collective claims and consolidate epistemic authority within narrow liberal frameworks.

Legal Source Hierarchies and the Marginalization of Collective Rights

In addition to epistemic exclusion, hierarchy in international law manifests through the stratification of legal sources. As Shelton (2006) argues, the formal architecture of international law privileges certain types of norms (most notably treaty law and customary law) over others such as declarations, resolutions, or soft law instruments. This source-based hierarchy has profound implications for legal authority, enforceability, and symbolic legitimacy.

This distinction plays a critical role in determining which rights gain legal traction and which remain aspirational. Civil and political rights, often encoded in binding treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), enjoy strong institutional recognition and enforcement mechanisms. By contrast, collective, ecological, or Indigenous rights are often expressed through non-binding instruments such as the UNDRIP, a General Assembly resolution with no formal legal force. As a result, rights that are essential to community identity, historical memory, and territorial belonging are frequently relegated to a normative periphery.

This legal stratification reflects a deeper symbolic ordering, whereby civil and political rights are framed as “core” while collective rights remain contingent or aspirational. The codification of the former in binding treaties, and the relegation of the latter to declarations, exemplifies how law stabilizes certain identities as universally valid while marking others as peripheral. As Brems (2004) notes, the supposed indivisibility of rights often masks institutional preferences aligned with dominant political and economic orders. Hierarchy is thus embedded not only in the content of rights but in the grammar of legal sources themselves. The unequal status of instruments, particularly the marginalization of soft law in areas such as cultural or environmental justice, produces uneven legal protection and entrenches structural bias.

Through this source-based stratification, vulnerability becomes hierarchically distributed: harms linked to individual civil and political rights receive robust institutional recognition, while collective, ecological, or culturally grounded vulnerabilities remain legally fragile and marginalized.

Whose Rights? Whose History? Foundational Exclusions in Human Rights Law

The adoption of the UDHR in 1948 is often presented as the founding moment of modern international human rights law. Yet, its content reflects a liberal-individualist tradition that privileged individual rights and reframed or excluded collective claims (Bisaz, 2012; Donnelly, 2017; Jovanović, 2012). Proposals for group-based protections were frequently reframed in individualistic terms or excluded altogether (Blake, 2016; Vrdoljak, 2014). The declaration's architecture institutionalized this bias, embedding a normative preference for the autonomous legal subject. Read through our typology, this foundational moment exemplifies a convergence of normative hierarchy (which rights are “core”), epistemic hierarchy (which knowledges count as universal), and symbolic hierarchy (which imaginaries of the legal subject are valorized).

This asymmetry becomes even clearer when contrasted with the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). While the UDHR was translated into binding covenants with monitoring mechanisms, UNDRIP remains a non-binding declaration despite representing the claims of hundreds of millions (Bisaz, 2012; Vrdoljak, 2014). This contrast reveals a hierarchy of sources and institutions that stabilizes some subjectivities and rights as universally binding, while consigning others to the margins of aspirational discourse.

As Jensen (2016) shows, this framing was contested in the 1960s by postcolonial states seeking to reconstruct global values. Yet, as Anghie (2023) and Appiagyei-Atua (2015) argue, international law preserved a civilizational logic that elevated Euro-American models while marginalizing spiritual, relational, and community-based worldviews (Santos, 2015). This “abyssal thinking” renders entire legal traditions, such as Indigenous and ecological frameworks, almost completely non-existent in global normativity. In short, the historical record does not merely document bias; it discloses hierarchy as a principle of legal ordering that sorts subjects, harms, and remedies in advance.

Norm diffusion processes reinforced these hierarchies. Norms were not just adopted but disseminated through structures of power such as aid dependency, conditionality, and epistemic asymmetry, which consolidated global legal inequality (Afshari, 2015; Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Zarakol, 2017). As a result, actors such as refugees, Indigenous peoples, and stateless persons were marginalized not only materially but discursively (Chapman and Carbonetti, 2011; Fraser, 1997; Heikkilà and Mustaniemi-Laakso, 2020). Regional counter-movements, such as African jurisprudence affirming collective rights (Shyllon, 2016), demonstrate that legal pluralism is possible but remains contested.

Finally, historiography itself participates in these hierarchies. Kleinlein and d’Aspremont (2025) argue that selective legal memory legitimizes dominant orders by obscuring alternative genealogies. Historicizing hierarchy is thus essential to explain why certain rights become codified and justiciable while others remain aspirational.

Unmasking Universality: Contestations From the Margins

The symbolic economy of legitimacy privileges claims aligned with dominant values while silencing others. As Mutua's (2001) “Savages–Victims–Saviors” metaphor illustrates, human rights discourse often reproduces colonial scripts, casting Western actors as rescuers and non-Western communities as passive victims (Reidel, 2010). This misalignment is reinforced and sustained by media visual portrayals, which tend to oscillate between humanitarian plight and securitization, shaping public support for protection or control, and, consequently, the institutional uptake and enforceability of claims (Lajeunesse et al., 2025). This dynamic sustains epistemic domination by monopolizing law and morality. Efforts to promote common ground (Bhuta, 2012) have limited institutional impact. Even when collective claims are symbolically recognized (e.g., in UNDRIP), a persistent gap remains between recognition and protection (Bisaz, 2012; Lenzerini, 2016).

Despite these embedded hierarchies, the human rights regime has also become a site of contestation and negotiated transformation. Postcolonial, feminist, and Indigenous movements have challenged dominant interpretations of rights and called for greater epistemic plurality and cultural recognition. Symbolic advances, such as UNDRIP or the emerging recognition of nature's rights, illustrate pluralizing efforts, but remain constrained by legal instruments’ non-binding nature and state-centric interpretation. A striking example is Pueblo Indígena Kichwa de Sarayaku v. Ecuador (2012), where the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized Indigenous territorial rights but reframed them through the grammar of state procedure, rather than Indigenous relational conceptions of land (Heri, 2021). Even progressive jurisprudence thus reproduces epistemic and symbolic hierarchies, tolerating alternative legalities only when translated into dominant categories.

Özsu (2024) deepens this critique by tracing how international law's post-1960 development, ostensibly shaped by decolonization, nonetheless preserved key structural hierarchies, thus limiting the transformative potential of newly independent states. These constraints continue to shape the reception of non-Western claims in human rights discourse today. Taken together, these claims show that “unmasking universality” requires more than inclusion of new subjects; it demands reconfiguring the hierarchical filters (sources, forums, vocabularies) through which recognition becomes enforceable.

Fraser (1997, 2000) highlights how claims for redistribution and recognition frequently clash with legal systems designed to preserve the very hierarchies they claim to transcend. This tension is mirrored in the treatment of vulnerability. When reduced to a static or individual attribute, it risks becoming depoliticized, naturalizing inequality rather than interrogating its structural production (Fineman, 2017; Koivunen et al., 2018; Lajeunesse, 2025). Drawing on Butler's (2006) notion of precariousness, we understand recognition as a filtering mechanism determining which lives are grievable and which injustices are intelligible in legal discourse. Here, precariousness is a universal human condition of embodied vulnerability, but it becomes politically distributed through hierarchies that render some lives more protectable, recognizable, or “grievable” than others (Butler, 2010).

In this sense, precariousness does not merely reflect ontological fragility. Rather, it is actively shaped and stratified by legal and epistemic hierarchies. From this angle, contestation must target the epistemic and institutional foundations of norm production (Lajeunesse, 2025). Accordingly, Santos (2015) calls for an “epistemology of the South” that recognizes relational ontologies, oral traditions, and human–nature cosmologies as co-constitutive sources of normativity.

Recognition as a Battleground: Whose Claims Matters in International Law?

As Donnelly (2007, 2008) notes, despite its universalist aspirations, the international human rights regime reflects predominantly Western liberal conceptions of rights, while marginalizing alternative traditions. This pattern of selective legitimacy has persisted from early codification to contemporary debates. Lang (2022) argues that the legitimacy crisis of human rights stems in part from its detachment from pressing global crises like authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and epistemic injustice. She calls for a reframing of rights through pluralistic frameworks capable of responding to emerging challenges.

Brems (2004) offers a model of “modest universalism” that acknowledges diversity and promotes normative flexibility while maintaining shared ethical standards. Rather than framing universality and relativism as a binary, scholars like de Varennes (2006) and Petersen (2011) advocate legal pluralism that upholds both shared principles and cultural specificity. In this spirit, Lenzerini (2016) urges a reconceptualization of human rights that integrates cultural, spiritual, and territorial identity as constitutive, not exceptional, elements of justice.

This pluralist turn must also confront the colonial origins of the international legal order. Anghie (2023) and Appiagyei-Atua (2015), from TWAIL perspectives, demonstrate how universality has historically been constructed through epistemic exclusion. Their calls go beyond critique to demand a reconstruction of international law based on plural moral traditions. Santos (2015) reinforces this decolonial move, calling for the recognition of legal knowledges long cast as illegitimate by dominant institutions.

Normative stratification is also visible in the environmental domain. As Timmer et al. (2021) show, anthropocentric legal frameworks marginalize ecological and intergenerational justice, reproducing hierarchies between human and non-human life. The case Teitiota v. New Zealand (2020) illustrates this dynamic vividly: the applicant argued that rising sea levels in Kiribati placed his life at risk, but the Committee rejected his claim on the grounds that the harm was not “imminent” enough to trigger refugee protection (Mayrhofer et al., 2025). This decision reveals a hierarchy of vulnerability: political persecution is treated as urgent and justiciable, while slow-onset climate threats are rendered invisible. This reluctance to recognize gradual environmental degradation as constituting legally cognizable harm reflects what Nixon (2011) has termed “slow violence”: forms of destruction that unfold incrementally, often invisibly, and without the spectacle required to trigger legal or political urgency. In this sense, hierarchy operates not only across identities and epistemologies, but across temporalities. International law tends to privilege acute, event-based harm over cumulative and relational forms of vulnerability, thereby reinforcing a temporal hierarchy in the recognition of risk. In this sense, the law stratifies whose suffering becomes intelligible as a rights violation, producing hierarchies of grievable lives (Butler, 2010).

Mayrhofer et al. (2025) add that vulnerability, though increasingly invoked, is often stripped of its historical and structural dimensions, particularly in cases of climate displacement. They advocate reframing it as a relational and systemic condition, grounded in accountability and context. Together, these examples underscore the limitations of addressing injustice through a single axis of hierarchy. As Fraser (1997) and Crenshaw (1989) emphasize, systems of domination intersect across race, class, gender, and geography, producing layered inequalities that evade liberal legal categories. Moreover, the institutions responsible for adjudicating rights claims, such as UN bodies and international tribunals, are themselves stratified in terms of authority, participation, and enforcement capacity. Syroid and Fomina (2023) highlight this institutional incoherence, calling for a more harmonized and substantive application of vulnerability across mechanisms.

Finally, Kleinlein and d’Aspremont (2025) remind us that legal authority is historically constructed. Their historiographical critique exposes how dominant narratives about the legal past continue to legitimize present asymmetries, reinforcing the call for a reflexive, historically aware legal order. Seen through our typology, Teitiota shows that vulnerability is not merely a protective concept inadequately applied, but a classificatory mechanism through which law hierarchizes risks, lives, and futures. The hierarchy of vulnerability is thus spatial, epistemic, and temporal. Asymmetries embedded in human rights law reverberate across borders and bodies; the next section examines how our typology operates across global, regional, and domestic scales.

Legal Equality in Practice: How Domestic Structures Reproduce Global Injustice

Hierarchical relations are not limited to international politics; they are also deeply embedded within national legal and institutional systems. Domestic structures of governance, whether authoritarian or democratic, often reproduce broader patterns of global inequality through asymmetric distributions of decision-making authority, legal access, and normative legitimacy. In many contexts, public law regimes reflect and reinforce social stratifications, where access to justice, administrative protection, and political participation is mediated by race, class, gender, and legal status. Autocratic regimes concentrate power vertically, and even liberal democracies rely on layered structures of authority that reflect entrenched social, economic, and racialized disparities.

These internal hierarchies affect how rights are distributed and enforced. As Krisch (2005) contends, international legal structures are shaped by hegemonic power relations, allowing dominant states to shape legal norms and selectively enforce them in ways that preserve their strategic and political interests. Similarly, Slaughter (2004) emphasizes that the rise of transgovernmental legal networks benefits actors embedded in powerful institutional and epistemic infrastructures, reinforcing unequal access to decision-making and norm interpretation. In practice, norm enforcement mechanisms, whether judicial, administrative, or informal, tend to be more accessible and responsive to actors who hold institutional authority, linguistic fluency, or financial resources, reinforcing a stratified global legal order.

These enforcement asymmetries intersect with deeper symbolic exclusions. As Fraser (2000) points out, claims for justice must address not only economic redistribution but also cultural recognition, since many marginalized groups are not simply deprived materially but are also denied the symbolic status of full legal subjects. Likewise, Crenshaw's (1989) concept of intersectionality reveals how overlapping systems of oppression generate complex vulnerabilities that often remain legally invisible. Theilen (2024) adds that institutional references to intersectionality often neutralize its transformative potential, reducing it to administrative discourse. Across various contexts, marginalized groups, including migrants, LGBTQ + persons, and Indigenous peoples, face overlapping exclusions rooted in fragmented implementations of vulnerability and interpretive resistance to collective rights (Blake, 2016; Chapman and Carbonetti, 2011; Donders, 2015; Syroid and Fomina, 2023).

As Fineman (2017) notes, inequality is embedded in institutional design, requiring legal responses that address historical injustice and systemic asymmetry, particularly in asylum, climate, and anti-discrimination regimes where protections often fail to materialize (Mayrhofer et al., 2025). Transversal hierarchies thus operate as bridges between internal injustice and global stratification, producing compound disadvantages that domestic law often fails to redress. In this sense, as Santos (2015) reminds us, legal pluralism should not be reduced to tolerance. Rather, it must be treated as an epistemic imperative.

Recognizing subaltern legalities and community-based justice within domestic systems challenges the verticality of legal authority and fosters more horizontal legal imaginaries. Brem'’s (2004) model of “modest universalism” offers a valuable path forward, accommodating cultural specificity while upholding a shared ethical baseline rooted in procedural fairness and mutual recognition. We therefore argue that domestic reform and international redesign must be thought together: without aligning institutional, normative, and symbolic hierarchies across scales, intersectional harms remain formally acknowledged yet practically unremedied.

Colonial Legacies in the Present: Stratifying Rights in the Global Legal Order

Power asymmetries rooted in gender, race, and colonialism are not historical remnants, as they remain constitutive features of the global legal order. Feminist legal theorists such as Fineman and Grear (2013) have shown how legal institutions often overlook the structural conditions that produce vulnerability, thereby reproducing gendered and racialized hierarchies under the guise of neutrality. This critique, first articulated at the domestic level, extends here to global structures and their claims to legitimacy.

These hierarchies are reinforced by legal regimes that claim universality while privileging dominant narratives of civility and order. As previously discussed, human rights discourse often casts Western actors as saviors and non-Western societies as victims, justifying intervention while marginalizing alternative visions. Anghie (2023), building on TWAIL, shows how doctrines of sovereignty and civilization continue to structure global legal authority, cloaking colonial logics in modern legal form. Appiagyei-Atua (2015) critiques this epistemic violence and calls for grounding legal legitimacy in ethical plurality and historical accountability. In a similar vein, Özsu (2024), in his decolonization patterns critiques, reveals how formal legal recognition for newly independent states coexisted with the preservation of structural subordination through economic dependency, institutional design, and selective norm development.

Legal frameworks remain particularly exclusionary where they intersect with spiritual, territorial, or kinship-based ontologies that exceed liberal constructs of identity and harm. As Jovanović (2012) argues, collective legal subjects remain largely unintelligible within regimes shaped by the autonomous individual, rendering culturally displaced communities structurally invisible.

Racialized and class-based stratification of mobility illustrates how these colonial logics persist in contemporary legal orders. While elite and voluntary forms of movement are normalized and protected, forced displacement from the Global South is pathologized and securitized, echoing deeper colonial distinctions between legitimate and suspect mobilities. This reinforces the boundaries of legal recognition along historical lines of domination. As Lang (2022) observes, international human rights law remains ill-equipped to address these differentiated crises due to its Western, state-centric foundations.

Addressing these gaps demands more than procedural reform: it requires epistemic transformation as defined previously. Hence, what counts as legal harm or knowledge is filtered through Eurocentric assumptions (Santos, 2015). Nijman and Werner (2013) likewise caution that legal equality, when abstracted from material and historical context, conceals deep asymmetries. They call for a pluralist ethic of recognition, one that foregrounds power, positionality, and the histories that shape legal legibility.

A more reflexive legal order must therefore interrogate not just who is excluded, but how the criteria of inclusion are themselves shaped by colonial and liberal paradigms. Only by revisiting these foundations can we begin to envision legal norms that are not merely universal in aspiration, but plural, accountable, and structurally just. Our typology clarifies this task by distinguishing the planes on which reform must occur: material redistribution, normative recalibration, epistemic inclusion, symbolic re-signification, and institutional redesign.

Symbolic Power and the Politics of Legal Recognition

While much attention has been given to material forms of power in world politics, symbolic and epistemic authority play a crucial role in reproducing global legal hierarchies. As Finnemore (1996) notes, norm diffusion and institutional design are shaped by symbolic capital and performative legitimacy. Legal systems do not merely reflect power: they confer it by defining what counts as valid knowledge, credible harm, and recognizable identity.

This symbolic authority is not neutral. As Koskenniemi (2010) argues, human rights discourse often operates as a strategy of institutional power, presenting dominant normative preferences as universal and neutral. By diffusing critique through technocratic language, international law often neutralizes dissent, consolidates hegemonic narratives, and delegitimizes subaltern alternatives. Rajagopal (2009) similarly shows how international law has functioned as a disciplinary apparatus, framing resistance as deviance and reaffirming state-centric, liberal authority through symbolic legitimation.

Rather than restating the critiques of vulnerability and intersectionality developed earlier, this section highlights how their co-optation illustrates a broader dynamic: the symbolic system of law absorbs critical vocabularies only to defang their political content (Lajeunesse, 2025). As Timmer et al. (2021), Theilen (2024), and Mayrhofer et al. (2025) all demonstrate, institutional framings often sanitize structural critiques, turning vulnerability into an administrative category, intersectionality into a checklist, and pluralism into rhetorical tolerance. It thus reinforces the very hierarchies these concepts sought to challenge. Koivunen et al. (2018) further emphasize that vulnerability operates as a political language, capable of either resisting or reinforcing hierarchy depending on how it is mobilized.

This dynamic reveals what Heikkilà and Mustaniemi-Laakso (2020) call a dual imperative: to reconceptualize vulnerability as relational and structural, and to embed this understanding in effective legal protections. When deployed by marginalized actors, vulnerability can expose injustice and demand recognition; when co-opted, it risks becoming a bureaucratic label devoid of critical force. Recognition in international law, then, is not simply a matter of moral urgency or factual harm. It reflects a broader symbolic economy in which legal intelligibility is governed by institutional filters, epistemic gatekeeping, and normative hierarchies. The exclusion of collective rights, as discussed earlier, is reinforced here through symbolic legitimations that define whose identity, suffering, or resistance is rendered actionable under law.

As Syroid and Fomina (2023) observe, vulnerability remains inconsistently conceptualized, often disconnected from systemic inequality or intersectional exposure to risk. Thus, the law does not merely mirror inequality; it manufactures and legitimizes it. In that sense, Krisch (2005) shows how hegemonic powers curate the production and enforcement of norms under the guise of universality, while Koskenniemi (2010) reveals how legal institutions depoliticize contestation by confining it within doctrinal boundaries. Hence, this institutional architecture is not incidental: it is constitutive.

Finally, Theilen (2024) cautions that intersectionality, when stripped of its structural core, risks becoming “administrative tokenism”. This mirrors the fate of vulnerability and reinforces our central argument: legal inequality is not an implementation flaw, but the product of intertwined material, epistemic, and symbolic hierarchies. Hence, shifting from symbolic affirmation to structural transformation requires synchronized interventions across the five dimensions of hierarchy: only then can recognition translate into enforceable protection and coauthored norm production.

Reclaiming Universality: Toward a Plural and Dialogical Legal Order

While hierarchy reveals patterns of domination, it also conceals the symbolic and epistemic mechanisms that sustain those patterns. Donnelly (2017) suggests more precise concepts (rule, inequality, authority) may better capture these dynamics. Yet, reconceptualized as a norm-producing force, we contend that hierarchy remains analytically productive because it connects material, normative, epistemic, symbolic, and institutional dimensions in a single explanatory frame.

The contested nature of universality is central to this rethinking. Afshari (2015) critiques Donnelly's “relative universality” as too abstract and culturally insensitive. In response, scholars advocate a pluralist and negotiated model of universality that is not fixed, but situated and deliberative. Petersen (2011) argues for democratic procedures that preserve minimum guarantees while enabling plural voices; Kinley (2012) likewise emphasizes that human rights pluralism, when grounded in development and deliberation, can foster more inclusive and historically situated norms; Golder (2016) views universality as a recontested site of political meaning shaped by shifting historical and institutional conditions.

Crucially, Santos (2015) insists that the legitimacy of international law cannot rest on the mere inclusion of subaltern perspectives into preexisting frameworks. Instead, it demands an “ecology of knowledges,” a legal epistemology that treats suppressed traditions as co-constitutive of norm production. Kleinlein and d’Aspremont (2025) reinforce this point by showing how legal historiography itself operates as a site of epistemic control, legitimizing dominant genealogies while excluding alternative legal pasts. Building on this, Jensen (2016) shows how the historical framing of human rights was recalibrated to fit geopolitical agendas, marginalizing more radical or collectivist alternatives.

Rethinking universality thus requires not only forward-looking reform, but retrospective awareness of how epistemic exclusions were inscribed into legal authority. Bisaz (2012) takes this further by proposing a reconfiguration of legal subjectivity beyond the liberal individual to embrace collective identities, minority worldviews, and relational forms of justice. This implies treating norm production not as elite articulation but as co-creation, where Indigenous, feminist, ecological, and postcolonial perspectives are foundational rather than peripheral.

Last, as Jovanovic (2012) further notes, rights frameworks anchored solely in autonomous individualism remain blind to collective harm and relational identity. Transforming universality therefore entails revising both the ontological assumptions of the legal subject and the epistemic foundations of law. Hierarchical universality ranks some vulnerabilities as urgent and others as peripheral; a dialogical model instead seeks to destabilize these hierarchies and equalize authority in defining harm. Universality becomes not a fixed standard but an ongoing process through which legal visibility is renegotiated.

In short, dismantling hierarchical filters of intelligibility requires dialogical procedures that recognize multiple epistemic traditions. Yet procedural reform alone is insufficient if the conception of the legal subject remains liberal-individualist. This limitation opens the second trajectory of reconstruction.

Decolonizing Normativity: Intersectional and Relational Approaches to Human Rights

The second trajectory lies in adopting intersectional, decolonial, and relational approaches to human rights. Crenshaw (1989) and Fraser (2000) show that legal regimes often isolate harms, failing to address interlocking systems of oppression. This is exacerbated by legalism's reliance on abstraction and formal autonomy. Intersectionality exposes how legal categories erase complexity. By mobilizing our typology, we demonstrate that intersectionality does not simply add another axis of analysis but reveals how hierarchies intersect and reinforce each other across levels and forums (Lajeunesse, 2025).

Colonial legacies (legal, institutional, and epistemic) continue to shape which rights are legitimized, contested, or erased. From a TWAIL perspective, Anghie (2023) and Özsu (2024) show how doctrines of sovereignty and civilization embedded inequality into the very architecture of international law, even during decolonization. Both authors argue for an epistemic rupture and a reorientation of legitimacy around solidarity and reparative justice.

Lenzerini (2014) calls for the “culturalization” of rights, centering spirituality, historical memory, and collective harm, rather than procedural inclusion. Blake (2016), further expands this horizon by recognizing both cultural dispossession and ecological degradation as violations of collective integrity, challenging the anthropocentric and extractivist biases embedded in international law. Lang (2022) adds the need for legal legitimacy grounded in collective agency and ethical responsiveness, especially amid planetary crisis and democratic erosion.

Together, these perspectives call for moving beyond critique to reorient law around care, reciprocity, and reparative memory. Care foregrounds relational obligations; reciprocity demands mutual recognition across legal orders; reparative memory integrates historical accountability into interpretation and remedy.

As Jovanovic (2012) reminds us, rights frameworks anchored solely in autonomous individualism remain blind to collective harm and relational identity. Universality, equality, and dignity must therefore be reanchored in the lived struggles of those historically excluded rather than in abstract ideals. Santos (2015) makes clear that universalism cannot be just while those erased by the global legal imagination remain invisible. If human rights are to remain credible, they must be grounded in a plural, intersectional, and decolonial grammar of justice.