The growth of the international women's rights movement and its emergence as a field of research and advocacy has led to a valuable but increasingly self-contained discourse, often cut off from developments in postcolonial conditionalities (‘Postcoloniality’), on the one hand, and conceptions of the different legal contexts in which international human rights operate, on the other. Such a trajectory of ‘development’ in human rights standards for women have no doubt had an enormous impact on women's lives worldwide, but simultaneously it is also culpable of creating the ‘woman-as-victim’ subject, ‘geographically captive’ in the ‘barbaric’ cultures of the ‘Third World’.