Globalization is not simply a matter of transnational trade, and of the state, non-state and supra-state legal regimes which facilitate, regulate or resist it; it also involves transnational social, cultural, intellectual and ideological forces. These forces play upon strategically located knowledge-based elites which play an important role in restructuring the legal fields by which public and public and private institutions are constituted. Canada's experience of globalization—unique because of proximity to the United States—has been both exemplified and, in part, shaped by the fate of its knowledge-based elites, including the business community (especially that part of it involved directly or indirectly with transnational corporations), academics and intellectuals, lawyers, artists and other cultural figures, and individuals involved in politics and public administration. Because of the effects of this “globalization of the mind” upon the institutions which all of these elites inhabit, state and non-state legal fields associated with them have been transformed.

The problem of universalism and relativism in human rights needs to be considered through ethnographic examinations of the mobilization of global human rights in local political struggles. Using the example of a local movement against gender violence in the United States, this article argues that the rights approach provides important resources for local movements but contains particular Western concepts and categories of subjectivity. Given the extent to which legal strategies are subverted within and outside the legal system, here the rights strategy creates new cultural spaces far more than it produces coercive intervention. A framework of legal pluralism and local mobilization provides a perspective which moves beyond the dichotomies of the universalism/relativism debate.