In the context of globalization and of post-conflict and humanitarian interventions, the hegemonic ideal of cosmopolitanism, as the universal ideal of both European Enlightenment and the colonial civilizing mission, is been strongly contested. The very same context is also testing the limits of cultural relativism and human rights discourses which endow today’s neo-cosmopolitan hegemonic and unilateral legal practices with significance

More than fifteen years ago Hamid Dabashi had written that, “The re-emergence of civilizational thinking at the last two decades of the 20th century…