The transnational circulation ofpeople and ideas is transforming the world we live in, but grasping its full complexity is extraordinarily difficult. To do so, it is essential to focus on specific places where transnational flows are happening. The international human rights movement against violence to women provides a valuable site for understanding how new categories ofmeaning emerge and are applied to social practices around the world. These meanings are often enthusiastically appropriated by regional, national, and local social movements and used to criticize everyday practices ofviolence. In order for human rights ideas to be effective, however, they need to be translated into local terms and situated within local contexts of power and meaning. They need, in other words, to be remade in the vernacular. How does this happen? Do people in local communities reframe human rights ideas to fit into their system ofcultural meanings? Do they resist ideas that seem unfamiliar? Examining this process is crucial to understanding the way human rights act in the contemporaryworld.

In January 2002 Fiji presented its first ever country report to the United Nations committee charged with monitoring compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). One of the most controversial sections of the report addressed the use of the practice of bulubulu, or village reconciliation, in cases of rape. During the public presentation of the report in New York City by Fiji’s Assistant Minister for Women, the nuances of bulubulu as a sociolegal practice in postcolonial Fiji were obscured within what quickly became complicated layers of political miscommunication, the imperatives of a surging Fijian nationalism, and, as always, the politicization of culture.