The 21st Century has been referred to as the era/ age of human rights. In fact, since 1945, the United Nations has elaborated over 70 covenants, resolutions, declarations, and recommendations relating to the application and observation of human rights. Though respect for human rights and their implementation largely vary from country to country and in many parts of the globe, compliance with the basic standards of human rights has still become a gauge and key indicator of national and international ¡°modern¡± society.

This paper takes a closer look at the interplay between the globalization of human rights modernism and more recent conceptualizations and experiences of human rights that stress the flexibility of human rights processes and allow for new interpretations. Citing various practices from Kenya, the paper thus clarifies that the UN¡¯s human rights modernism can no longer be seen as a homogenizing agent that flattens local situations into replicas of each other. Instead, human rights must be understood within its ¡°social life¡± and inter-cultural conversations and negotiations with complex repertories of meanings extracted from myriad sources and reinterpreted through local understandings present in all societies.