Human Rights Regimes and The Last Utopia

Human rights has been proclaimed the hegemonic normative discourse of our time—the “only political-moral idea that has won universal acceptance”¹—but as the following exchange vividly demonstrates, the history of human rights ascendance and its contribution to emancipatory politics is sharply contested. In part, the controversy springs from the very different forms of politics and governance that have taken shape around the discourse of human rights over the past half century: the contours of different human rights regimes. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, for example, provided an international legal framework for adjudicating state atrocities like those committed by the Nazi regime during World War II. During the 1980s, human rights were invoked by protesting citizens themselves urging the democratic transformation of authoritarian regimes. Closer to our own time—in the “age of terror”—human rights has become the ruling norm of global security politics, authorizing international economic sanctions and state military interventions, and spawning the parallel governmental discourse of the “Responsibility to Protect” (r2p). Most recently, human rights were democratically mobilized once again in the revolutionary transformations of the Arab world.²

While some political philosophers still approach human rights in austere and abstract isolation from the worldly contexts in which they are embedded and given practical meaning, there is a growing consensus even among the philosophers that inquiry into human rights must attend to the modes of action they enable and disable and to the particular mechanisms of evaluation and enforcement they authorize. The “political conception” of human rights, as it is sometimes called, urges awareness that “human rights discourses are always polemical and ultimately unintelligible if one does not understand the political stakes in historical contexts.”³ To detach human rights from the discursive, institutional, and affective worlds in and through which they are enacted is to fail to grasp them both historically and conceptually, and the explosion of human rights scholarship over the past decade has cut a necessarily interdisciplinary path through the relevant legal, philosophical, historical, political, literary, and ethnographic terrain.

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History offers one of the most important and controversial contributions to these debates. The basic outlines of his argument are now well known. Moyn dramatically revises the self-congratulatory monumentalism of “church histories” of human rights, which anchor the moral arc of their narratives in eighteenth-century revolutionary invocations of the “rights of man” or in the entrenchment of human rights in international law after World War II. Instead, Moyn locates the rapid spread of human rights only in the late 1970s, as they become a centerpiece of the Carter administration’s foreign policy and of international ngos like Amnesty International. Human rights achieve dominance, Moyn argues, only as anticolonial, and often socialist, struggles for collective self-determination lose their emancipatory promise. “The romance of third-world revolution,” Moyn writes, “and, where necessary, guerrilla warfare, provides the starkest counterpoint to later human-rights activism—especially since the human rights revolution of the late 1970s not only displaced it but also targeted it for its most passionate criticism.” Moyn argues that “human rights entered global rhetoric in a kind of hydraulic relationship with self-determination: to the extent the one appeared, and progressed, the other declined, or even disappeared.”⁴ Moyn’s emphasis on the disjunctions and discontinuities that mark the surprisingly recent ascent of human rights confronts readers not only with the fragile contingency of this emergence but also with a sense of its usually unrecognized political costs. If certain modes of action and visions of emancipation are enabled by human rights, others are just as surely foreclosed. Moyn’s book clears the ground for a more realistic assessment of the successes and the failures of human rights politics, disenthralling readers from the seductive allure of moralistic “antipolitics” and urging more attention to the various roads not taken.

In this lively exchange, three distinguished scholars—Antony Anghie, Pheng Cheah, and Seyla Benhabib—engage The Last Utopia from the interweaving disciplinary perspectives of international law, postcolonial studies, and political theory...