Can human rights become a framework for global justice? It is only through cultural politics that human rights might become more than abstract moral ideals, that they might be institutionalised in concrete ways to protect human beings from arbitrary detention, torture and disappearance and to advance protection from starvation and the social destruction of poverty.

The cultural politics in which human rights activists are engaged to realise human rights in practice from within states is ‘cosmopolitanism-from-below’. While ‘cosmopolitanism-from-above’ concerns above all the design and construction of institutions of global governance by elites, the cultural politics of the human rights activists I have analysed in these pages is oriented towards imagining a political community of global citizens from within the state, historically constituted in popular terms as national. ‘Cosmopolitanism-from-below’ intersects with ‘cosmopolitanism-from-above’ insofar as activists draw on international human rights norms developed initially in the UN and the Council of Europe to bring cases in domestic courts. However, using intermestic human rights in the national context, they aim to persuade state officials of the government and judiciary, but also, through the mediated public, the ordinary people, the voters and taxpayers in whose name state officials act, to think and act as global citizens with rights and responsibilities towards individual human beings regardless of nationality.