Under the Eastern Partnership, the European Union (EU) has stepped up its transnational cooperation with civil society in the South Caucasus, considering it as a partner in the promotion of human rights and an asset for bottom-up democratization. This chapter proposes a transnational and relational analysis of human rights politics in the South Caucasus, revealing how the multi-scalar combination of EU interventions, post-socialist domestic conditions and grassroots agency creates particular challenges and tensions for civil society groups. First, the chapter deconstructs the dominant categories of human rights promotion as they are mainstreamed in EU transnational cooperation with civil society in the South Caucasus, by exposing their depoliticizing, homogenizing and geopoliticizing underpinnings. Second, it engages with alternative vocabularies, forms of socio-political organizing and emancipatory struggles that are voiced by activist groups across the South Caucasus region. By juxtaposing the EU’s paradigms with the contestation emerging on the ground, this chapter sketches out an alternative politics of human rights promotion. This would be based on different forms of socio-political organizing oriented towards the grassroots, the recognition of justice claims beyond rights-based legal frameworks, the rejection of the capitalist development logic of ‘catching up’ and a critical rethinking of the EU’s global engagement.