The research project addresses the question whether and to what extent the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from a practice-theory perspective can be conceptualized as a “sacralized” text being of fundamental importance for the lifeworlds in various political and social communities around the globe. From the perspective of a juridical “community of practice”, the rights enshrined in the Declaration and their reproduction in other legal documents trigger ubiquitous discourses of justification for public and private actions. Employing to the concept of de/sacralization from the joint research framework, this project attempts to analyze how the Universal Declaration has attained a status of transnational textual “authority” throughout diverse communities of practice and how this authority can be conceptionalised from such a transdisciplinary angle.
