The fieldwork interviews and focus group discussions remain vivid in my memory. I can still remember the determination in a rural-urban migrant mother’s voice as she described ‘manipulating’ the complex yet leaky Hukou system (i.e., a household registration system that categorizes the national population into urban and rural segments in China) to secure her child’s education in the urban primary school. Others, including the careful way community organizers translate abstract rights into everyday language and the moments when human dignity finds expression not through international conventions but through collective action in cramped urban neighborhoods, do clearly exist in my mind as well. It was 2013, and I was a master’s student at Chongqing University Law School, collaborating on a project that would fundamentally shape my intellectual journey, that is, investigating the right to education for rural-urban migrant households under the supervision of Professor Koen De Feyter (hereafter, I will call him simply Koen, for the very first time, in humble respect and remembrance, though as his student I always addressed him as Professor De Feyter).[1] That experience of witnessing how marginalized communities articulate their needs and make claims on power would later inspire my doctoral research on social networks and educational rights for migrant children in Beijing, also guided by Koen (and Professor Andrea De Guttry from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna).[2] Looking back now, following his unexpected passing in September 2024, I realize how profoundly his approach to human rights, one that insisted on starting from the ground up rather than the top down, has reshaped not only my own work but a field of scholarship that bridges the local and the global, the city and the world.[3]
Years later, in November 2018, I would meet Koen again at the University of Padova’s international conference ‘Cites, Territories and Struggles for Human Rights: a 2030 perspective’.[4] The conference brought together scholars exploring local authorities’ navigation between global sustainability commitments and community needs, examining the growing role of cities in human rights promotion within a multilevel governance framework. I had approached him, somewhat nervously, for his signature on my annual PhD report. What followed was quintessentially Koen. He set aside the paperwork and engaged me in a deep conversation about cities and human rights. As we talked, Koen was particularly interested in how my research field site, Beijing, connected to the broader patterns of urban rights mobilization. He encouraged me to think more boldly about how cities do not just implement human rights but transform them. To an essential extent, that conversation in Padova continues to influence my work on international law and cities, the emerging field that I view as an extension of Koen’s notion of ‘local relevance’. What crystallized for me during that exchange was something I had been observing throughout my collaboration with him: although cities appeared repeatedly in his empirical research, they functioned as settings for investigating deeper questions about how rights acquire meaning through practice rather than as subjects demanding their own theoretical apparatus. This piece attempts to trace, initially yet superficially, that unspoken contribution, unfolding the foundational insights offered by Koen’s concept of localizing human rights for emerging fields such as human rights cities and international law and cities, even though cities themselves were never his primary analytical focus.
To understand Koen’s contribution in this regard, we must first capture the distinctive character of his approach to human rights itself. During the 2000s, when many human rights scholars were preoccupied with defending universality against accusations of cultural imperialism or engaging in abstract debates about relativism, Koen resisted such ‘fashionable’ subjects in favor of more nuanced questions concerning the possibility of reversing the standard-setting process entirely. His 2006 discussion paper,[5] subsequently developed into a chapter in Economic Globalisation and Human Rights, proposed that human rights should be grounded in ‘local relevance’.[6] This was not merely an argument about the implementation or translation of existing norms. Rather, Koen envisioned a fundamental methodological reversal wherein the needs articulated by people responding to economic globalization’s impact on their lives would become the starting point for elaborating human rights norms themselves. Community-based organizations occupied a central place in this vision, not as passive recipients but as primary sites for identifying what human rights should mean in context.[7] The implications of this reversal extended far beyond methodology. If we took seriously the proposition that communities experiencing deprivation should shape how we understand rights, then international human rights law would need to become responsive to voices typically excluded from norm-making processes. Thus, Koen’s framework precisely emphasized bidirectionality—global norms might inform local struggles, but local struggles must equally inform the evolution of global norms.
The intellectual architecture supporting this vision received further refinement through collaborative work, particularly Gaby Oré Aguilar’s methodological operationalization into ‘tracks’ of analysis.[8] These tracks mapped pathways from local claims to human rights articulation, through translation into action, responses from various governance levels, and ultimately reciprocal transformation of both local realities and global norms. What distinguished this from typical implementation frameworks was its refusal to treat international law as fixed and its insistence that communities possessed epistemic authority about their own needs. However, Koen never romanticized the local as inherently authentic or progressive. His chapter ‘Sites of Rights Resistance’ acknowledged that communities could also be sites where dominant groups resisted expanding rights to marginalized members.[9] The framework recognized complexity without abandoning its core commitment: people experiencing deprivation deserved to be heard as authoritative voices about what justice required, not merely as beneficiaries of rights determined elsewhere. This commitment would animate all of Koen’s subsequent empirical work, leading him repeatedly into urban contexts.
Indeed, when Koen turned his theoretical apparatus toward empirical investigation, cities did organically emerge. But only as research sites, not as objects of any theory of human rights (law) and cities. The Chongqing study, as previously mentioned, was concerned about the systematic educational barriers created by China’s Hukou system for rural-urban migrant families.[10] During fieldwork, what became visible was not simply a gap between formal rights and actual access. Instead, the tactical knowledge about bureaucratic categories developed by these families, the informal supporting system formulated by neighborhoods, and the strategies that bypassed administrative constraints were also documented. That is to say, these were not communities waiting passively for international human rights law to reach them. They were social formations actively producing understandings of justice, often in hybrid terms mixing formal legal categories with vernacular expressions of dignity. From my understanding, Koen chose Chongqing because rural-urban migration patterns had created a population whose educational needs exposed contradictions in existing rights protections, not because the city had declared itself a human rights city or adopted municipal human rights frameworks. Similarly, the Delhi study within the same research project on Localising Human Rights approached slums as places where residents articulated claims recognizable within human rights frameworks, although often fused with local concepts like haq (a rightful claim).[11] Koen’s concern was whether his localizing framework could illuminate how people made sense of their situations, formulated demands, and sought to hold power accountable. Thus, urban settings mattered because they concentrated the populations, institutions, and inequalities that made certain forms of rights deprivation particularly visible and certain forms of collective organizing particularly feasible.
While these empirical works illuminated that local communities function as sites where rights meanings get actively constructed, contested, and transformed rather than simply applied, it is noteworthy to reinforce the perception that Koen did not foreground urbanism as an analytical category. In effect, his focus remained on substantive rights questions like education, water, and sanitation, which were primarily examined through attention to claims-making practices. To me, this represents both limitation and strength. On the one hand, Koen did not systematically theorize what distinguishes cities as rights spaces, what urban citizenship might entail, or how municipal governance creates particular opportunities and constraints. He never asked whether there was something inherent in urban form itself that shaped how rights get articulated and contested. On the other hand, exactly because his insights about localizing human rights were not confined to urban contexts, they proved portable across diverse settings such as rural areas, villages, peri-urban zones, and other spaces that resist neat categorization. This portability meant that when scholars later began explicitly theorizing human rights in cities, they could draw on Koen’s conceptual tools without inheriting any restrictive definition of what counted as properly urban. Put differently, the framework traveled because it was anchored in processes of claims-making rather than particular spatial arrangements.
Scholars now working on cities as subjects of inquiry have already benefited from the openness and unexpected portability of Koen’s approach. The human rights cities movement, which has gained momentum over the past decade, is an excellent example. When cities like Gwangju, York, or Vienna declare themselves human rights cities, they aim to make universal norms locally meaningful, establish accountability mechanisms closer to lived experience, and create spaces where rights can be articulated in vernacular terms.[12] Barbara Oomen and her colleagues, in Global Urban Justice: The Rise of Human Rights Cities, argue that such cities hold the potential of localizing human rights and bringing them in line with local practices and beliefs.[13] Oomen explicitly cited Koen’s work, recognizing that his framework provided conceptual tools for understanding what cities attempt when adopting human rights as organizing principles. More recently, Gil Shaham-Maymon’s analysis builds directly on Koen’s concept, noting that cities’ interactions with global human rights principles manifest through what he termed endeavors to ‘localize’ human rights, grounded in urban citizenship or ‘city-zenship’.[14] These scholars found in Koen’s work not a theory of cities but rather a methodological orientation that happened to illuminate urban dynamics particularly well. His insistence that norms should be responsive to communities experiencing marginalization, his documentation of how rights get vernacularized through practice, his attention to chains of actors connecting local claims to policy responses—all of this proved generative for understanding what human rights cities were attempting, even though Koen himself had not studied them as such.
In addition, the emerging field of international law and cities likewise finds Koen’s work relevant, often implicitly. The Research Handbook on International Law and Cities, edited by Helmut Aust and Janne Nijman, collectively demonstrates that cities have become active participants in domains traditionally considered the province of international law, including climate governance, migration policy, and the implementation of human rights.[15] Within this epitome of the latest scholarly efforts of the research field of international law and cities, a recurring theme concerns how international norms get translated and given meaning at the municipal level. This was precisely Koen’s problematique, albeit he focused more explicitly on communities in a context of the loosely constructed notion of local relevance rather than a clear articulation of municipal governments. Nevertheless, his insight that relationships between global norms and local practices should be bidirectional rather than unidirectional speaks directly to contemporary debates about cities’ roles in international law. For instance, when Martha Davis analyzes how US municipal ordinances implement international treaties that the national government has not ratified, she grapples with dynamics Koen identified: communities organizing to demand rights can reshape how norms get understood and operationalized across governance levels.[16] In this sense, the institutional arrangements differ and mechanisms vary, but the underlying dynamic remains constant, that is, claims articulated by those experiencing deprivation can transform what rights mean in practice.
Furthermore, and even more importantly, Koen’s work has a large potential to be read as a corrective against urban exceptionalism. Discussions of human rights cities, or broadly speaking, international (human rights) law and cities, sometimes treat cities as uniquely cosmopolitan or progressive spaces while overlooking how similar claims-making dynamics occur elsewhere. Koen avoided this trap because his framework asked questions that work across spatial contexts, as mentioned above. This scale-agnostic approach meant his work could contribute to the scholarship without being subsumed by it. For scholars working at the intersection of international law and cities, this proves both instructive and challenging. It pushes us to interrogate whether cities possess analytically distinctive properties as sites of rights practice, or whether they simply represent one manifestation of the more general phenomenon Koen was tracking. Although Koen did not provide a written answer to this, his teaching practice actually suggests the latter interpretation. When Koen did turn explicitly to urban questions in his teaching, particularly in the Advanced Course “The Inclusive, Sustainable City and Law” cooperated with his colleagues Stéphanie De Somer and Esther van Zimmeren at Antwerp within the English language LL.M. Programme he spearheaded, he did not develop a standalone urban theory.[17] On the contrary, he approached cities through the same analytical framework he applied elsewhere by focusing on ‘wicked problems’ (complex social challenges that resist simple solutions), centering marginalized communities (examining diversity and multiculturalism in poor neighborhoods, addressing disability in urban development), and maintaining his characteristic methodological commitments (interdisciplinary engagement, human rights frameworks, refusal of technical fixes divorced from social context). This pedagogical choice is revealing in the sense that it cautions us about how we construct the emerging field of international law and cities. If Koen’s intuition was correct—that cities require the application of general principles of rights localization rather than entirely new analytical tools—then we should reconsider or resist the temptation to overstate urban distinctiveness. In this vein, the real challenge is then not to reify cities as categorically different, but to examine how local contexts, of whatever scale, mediate the encounter between international norms and lived experience. Koen’s refusal to develop a special urban theory, even when teaching a course explicitly about cities, thus models a scholarly posture that is both attentive to context and skeptical of scale as an explanatory category in its own right.
Last but not least, Koen’s commitment to interdisciplinarity also deserves particular attention.[18] In his reflections on law and development research, he argued forcefully that understanding how rights function in context required moving beyond doctrinal analysis to engage seriously with sociology, anthropology, political science, and development studies.[19] This was not methodological eclecticism but rather a recognition that law on the books tells us little about law in action, that formal rights mean little without attention to power and institutional dynamics. Given that cities are inherently interdisciplinary objects, understanding how international law, in general, and human rights, in particular, play out in urban contexts demands engagement with other disciplines, such as urban geography, community sociology, the political economy of municipal governance, and the anthropology of everyday practices. Koen modeled this interdisciplinary engagement through research practice, collaborating across disciplines and training in multiple methodologies. His course on inclusive and sustainable cities embodied this approach, bringing together insights from planning law, property law, administrative law, and human rights while incorporating practitioner perspectives. To understand the human rights dimensions of urbanization, we must move beyond disciplinary silos. Koen demonstrated what such collaboration might achieve.
As I write here, I realize that this piece is already too long. But there is far too much left unsaid. Perhaps, incompleteness fits on this occasion. Likewise, Koen never finished his final book, the one meant to synthesize decades of fieldwork into what he called ‘lived human rights’.[20] When I think about his unspoken contribution to cities, human rights, and international law now, what matters most is not that he ‘failed’ to theorize urban space explicitly but that he ‘succeeded’ in showing us a different way of approaching it. For those of us continuing this work, his absence imposes a responsibility. The questions remain open in every city where rights are contested.
[1] Jingrong Chen, Ellen Desmet and Koen De Feyter, The Right to Education of Rural-Urban Migrant Households in Chongqing, China (Localizing Human Rights Working Paper Series No 3, University of Antwerp 2016).
[2] Shisong Jiang, Social Networks and the Right to Education of Rural-Urban Migrant Children in Beijing, China (PhD thesis, University of Antwerp and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna 2019).
[3] Wouter Vandenhole, ‘Mapping Koen De Feyter’s Academic Legacy: Geographies of Shared Responsibility for Sustainable Development for Subaltern People(s)’ (2025) 11 Journal of National Law University Delhi 1.
[4] University of Padova, ‘Cities, Territories and Struggles for Human Rights: A 2030 Perspective’ (International Conference, Padova, 26-27 November 2018).
[5] Koen De Feyter, ‘Localizing Human Rights’ (Discussion Paper 2006.02, University of Antwerp 2006) https://repository.uantwerpen.be/docman/irua/ab5f01/a7de0e20.pdf accessed 2 October 2025.
[6] Koen De Feyter, ‘Localizing Human Rights’ in Wolfgang Benedek, Koen De Feyter and Fabrizio Marrella (eds), Economic Globalization and Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2007) 68.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Gaby Oré Aguilar, ‘The Local Relevance of Human Rights: A Methodological Approach’ in Koen De Feyter and others (eds), The Local Relevance of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2011).
[9] Koen De Feyter, ‘Sites of Rights Resistance’ in Koen De Feyter and others (eds), The Local Relevance of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2011) 15.
[10] Chen, Desmet and De Feyter (n 1).
[11] Koen De Feyter and others, The Right to Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor in Delhi (Localizing Human Rights Working Paper Series No 4, University of Antwerp 2017).
[12] Barbara Oomen, ‘The Next Step: Coupling City-zenship to Human Rights’ (Verfassungsblog, 15 March 2020) https://verfassungsblog.de/the-next-step-coupling-city-zenship-to-human-rights/ accessed 2 October 2025.
[13] Barbara Oomen, Martha F Davis and Michele Grigolo (eds), Global Urban Justice: The Rise of Human Rights Cities (Cambridge University Press 2016) 13.
[14] Gil Shaham-Maymon and Dan Miodownik, ‘Who Will Protect Our Human Rights? Cities, States, and Ethnicity’ (2025) Journal of Urban Affairs (advance online publication) https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2024.2447346 accessed 2 October 2025.
[15] Helmut Philipp Aust and Janne E Nijman (eds), Research Handbook on International Law and Cities (Edward Elgar 2021).
[16] Martha F Davis, ‘Cities, Human Rights and Accountability: The United States Experience’ in Oomen, Davis and Grigolo (n 13) 23.
[17] University of Antwerp Faculty of Law, ‘The Inclusive, Sustainable City and Law’ (Course Description 2023-2024).
[18] Koen De Feyter, ‘Law Meets Sociology in Human Rights’ (2011) 40 Development and Society 45.
[19] Koen De Feyter, Gamze Erdem Türkelli and Stéphanie De Moerloose, ‘Future of Law and Development Research: An Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Law and Development’ in Koen De Feyter, Gamze Erdem Türkelli and Stéphanie De Moerloose (eds), Encyclopedia of Law and Development (Edward Elgar 2021) 1.
[20] Vandenhole (n 3) 14.