This approach is based on the notion that human rights only become imbued with meaning when specific groups use them to achieve particular goals. Much analysis of human rights litigation assumes that human rights are natural and that their meaning is consequently selfevident and constant across contexts. Following the more discursive and protest traditions, we argue, by contrast, that their meaning is only apparent when linked to specific interests and agendas and seen in the context of concrete struggles in particular places and at particular moments in time (Dembour 2010). As the studies of human rights litigation mentioned above show, human rights can be used for quite distinct, even contradictory, purposes depending on who uses them, the goals they wish to achieve, and the contexts in which they operate. Rights are thus clearly malleable as to their political purpose and policy implications. This, in turn, indicates that the meaning of human rights is inevitably linked to struggles over access to resources and power as they play out in specific political, social, and historical contexts. Accordingly, we give analytical primacy to the final factor mentioned above: the wider political and social struggles that have underlain human rights litigation.

A central element of our approach is thus to identify the principal groups involved in struggles over education policy and its implementation in specific developing country contexts; decipher their respective interests, agendas, and forms of leverage over policymaking and implementation; delineate how they promote or contest human rights and associated state obligations; and, finally, understand how rights-oriented litigation promotes or challenges these interests and agendas. The other factors mentioned above—that is, those related to institutional factors (such as court design and the nature of support structures for legal mobilization) and agential factors (judges’ attitudes, ideological commitments, and strategic choices)—enter the analysis as intervening variables that influence whether groups mobilizing rights or obligations are able to access the court system, on what terms, and the extent to which this system is receptive to their causes.

There is much in common between our approach and “subaltern cosmopolitan legality,” an approach to understanding the role of law in developing countries developed by de Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito (2005). According to the authors, the nature, use, and effect of law in developing countries are primarily shaped by the interests of the transnational capitalist class and, in particular, its interest in promoting neoliberal economic and social policy reform. At the same time, though, poor and marginalized citizens can make effective use of the law— and in particular human rights—to advance demands for social justice. Subaltern cosmopolitan legality, they say, is a bottom-up perspective that focuses on:

- How poor and marginalized citizens use human rights and other aspects of the law to challenge hegemonic projects such as neoliberalism.

- The importance of political as well as legal mobilization in these efforts.

- The way that poor and marginalized groups operate across scales through alliances with transnational nongovernmental actors and the use of extra-national legal mechanisms.

Overall, it is an approach that emphasizes the progressive potential of law—and especially human rights—at the same time that it acknowledges the effects of unequal power relationships on the nature of the law and its operation.

Our approach differs from subaltern cosmopolitan legality in that it views human rights as a tool that can be used by a range of actors, not just the poor and marginalized, to advance their interests. As several scholars have pointed out, there are tensions between notions of human rights and neoliberalism (Gauri 2004; O’Connell 2007). There are also fairly obvious tensions 10