The introduction sets out the book’s core argument. It situates this within existing critical approaches to human rights, showing how these hinge on the question of the human as the subject of rights, a subject shaped in relation to capitalism, colonialism, and the legal categories that constitute political economy. While various thinkers have considered how human rights might be mobilized “from below,” to interrupt dominant normative and legal schemas, what is at stake in such interventions cannot be grasped without attending to social movements’ actual struggles. More specifically, an understanding is needed of how the systemic violences that these struggles confront are both constituted and rendered invisible through the law, along with an understanding of how alternative normative schemas are constructed in struggle. The introduction then sets out the long-term involvement with social movement struggles in Colombia that informs the book’s unique approach and offers an outline of the chapters.