I remember the first time I had a long conversation with Koen De Feyter. It was in the cantine of the Law Faculty in Antwerp. I had started working on the Localizing Human Rights project of Koen a few weeks earlier and was expected to carry out a case study regarding the right to water and sanitation in the DR Congo. I had spent the first weeks on the job reading Koen’s and other colleagues’ publications on localization, law & development, and law in context. I felt well-prepared for our first meeting, eager to demonstrate the solid grasp I believed I had gained of the work he had been doing, and expected me to do. Five minutes into the conversation, he simply asked ‘but in a context of fragile or limited statehood, can we really see municipal authorities as duty bearers, or does it make more sense to understand them as de facto rights holders?’.
This question threw me off balance – which is, I suppose, exactly what is needed to start thinking beyond established norms and assumptions. To me these kinds of short but well-placed and highly pertinent questions became illustrative of the extent to which Koen, as a legal scholar, was always looking to challenge taken-for-granted notions, both his own and those of others, both legal ones and those from other disciplines. In the exchange that followed we both brought in insights from law, sociology, anthropology and political science. This kind of conversation, of which we later had so many, was not merely intellectually stimulating, it was also genuinely enjoyable because of the openness, curiosity and thinking on the spot it simultaneously allowed for – and required.
That first conversation was also indicative of Koen’s profound willingness to listen – to perspectives rooted in different disciplinary backgrounds, emerging from different regional contexts, and relating to a wider range of subjects than what many considered to be his ‘core business’. Koen listened – fully, as if that particular conversation he was having with you might just hold the key to rethinking the entire edifice of international human rights law. And he asked questions – precise, gentle, but critical questions that wove his own perspectives, interpretations, or critiques into what he had heard, handing your idea back to you as something richer than what you first offered.
This attitude greatly contributed to what was arguably one of Koen’s greatest achievements: he made the global human rights project feel less like a distant architecture and more like a shared undertaking. For him, “localizing human rights” was not just a research project. It was a method of working and a political commitment.
Building bridges – across institutions, fields and localities
During the time I worked with Koen, he never approached mentorship as a transfer of knowledge. Instead, he created spaces for his mentees to think expansively, critically and with attention for the reality of human rights practice.
This attention for the practice of human rights, profoundly characterizes what I consider to be a core component of Koen’s intellectual legacy: his insistence that human rights must be understood not only as universal norms and legal frameworks but also exist as situated and localized practices. His seminal 2006 paper, Localizing Human Rights,[1] can be read alongside Sally Merry’s contemporaneous work on vernacularizing human rights,[2] as laying the foundations for an entirely new school of human-rights scholarship, which sought to reconcile the promise of universality with the messiness and context-specificity of situated justice struggles.
In this 2006 piece, Koen complemented the emerging conversation on human rights as a situated practice with much-needed legal perspectives. As a legal scholar, he engaged with anthropological and sociological analyses and critiques of international law’s reliance on abstract universalism, thereby highlighting the risks this abstract universalism poses for both the effectiveness and legitimacy of the human-rights project. This proposal for understanding human rights law in context was neither a dilution of the universality principle, nor a rejection of existing legal protections. Instead, it was a call to both examine how existing norms are mobilized – and transformed – in practice, as well as to consider how those grounded practices might, in turn, inform and reshape the broader human rights architecture. In doing so, he went beyond scholarship that had until then primarily focused on how existing human rights norms operated in practice, urging colleagues to also ask how those dynamics could shape the further evolution of those formal rules.
This was his quiet but persistent challenge to the orthodoxy of his field: a call to reimagine human rights, not purely as doctrine or a fixed entity, but as an iterative process shaping up across scales and localities. Embracing the notion of inclusive universality,[3] Koen held that localizing human rights did not mean fragmenting or relativizing rights; but instead envisioned expanding their pertinence by making space for pluralism, context-specific interpretation, and the agency of rights holders.
This vision infused his work on a broad range of topics, as well as his view for the Law and Development Research Group and the Localising Human Rights Working Paper Series, which became a platform where scholars from across the world could publish empirical, socio-legal, and practice-driven research. These initiatives represented a research agenda that challenged disciplinary silos and encouraged scholars to foreground the lived realities of and struggle for human rights.
For me, working with Koen and building on his ideas further nourished my prior interest in justice struggles led by victims-protagonists – struggles that often resist neat legal categorization – and in foregrounding the ways human rights can nurture resistance and resilience in the face of gross human rights violations. In my own work on transitional justice, where global frameworks risk flattening histories and experiences of harm or prioritizing institutional templates over lived complexity, Koen’s approach continues to be an inspiration to critically enquire, deconstruct and rethink legal norms in ways that foreground the agency of victims-protagonists and situated practices and insights.
In that sense, Koen’s intellectual legacy extends well beyond the field of human rights. It speaks to a broader aspiration shared by many of us working on (human) rights, (transitional) justice, and social transformation: the hope that global frameworks can be reclaimed by those whose lives they ought to improve.
Commemoration and commitment
This piece of writing is not only an act of remembering or commemorating Koen, his work, and what he has meant for many of us. It is also an invitation to jointly reflect on how we can carry Koen’s vision forward, notably at a time when a lot of the challenges that Koen tried to respond to, seem to have only exacerbated. The kinds of direct and structural violences that several colleagues refer to in their contributions on this platform and beyond, have further underlined the limits of mainstream human rights frameworks, and seemingly widened the gaps between what communities and rights-holders need, and what a formal human rights framework can offer.
Yet, looking at some of these justice struggles through Koen’s eyes, offers an invitation to focus on the relentless work of justice actors and human rights activists: their memory work, documentation efforts, mobilization, consultation, strategic legal actions, and many other attempts at innovating and re-imagining a human rights framework that continues to hold appeal in a wide range of contexts – to re-imagine it in ways that better respond to their struggles and realities.
Koen’s legacy is not a finished architecture or model. It is an invitation, to keep foregrounding local agency, to continue bridging the distance between universal ideals and the communities whose struggles give those ideals life, to see human rights scholarship not as an academic undertaking, but as a socially engaged and self-reflective practice.
Koen’s passing leaves a profound void – for his family and friends primarily, but also for his students, his colleagues, and the communities and people he worked with. Yet when I think of the many moments of, and spaces for, shared reflection and meaning-making which he created, and about the many concrete contributions he made to the formal human rights architecture, I find myself experiencing a shimmer of ‘hope in the dark’:[4] a hope that human rights can remain – or become – a grounded, plural, and responsive practice in the service of rights holders and communities.
[1] Koen De Feyter. 2006. Localizing Human Rights. Journal of Human Rights 5(3): 1–25
[2] Sally Engle Merry. 2006. Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 38-51; Sally Engle Merry. 2006. Human rights and gender violence: translating international law into local justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[3] Eva Brems. 2001. Human rights: universality and diversity. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
[4] Rebecca Solnit. 2016. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Third edition. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.