The Rise and Fall of Human Rights?: Searching for a Narrative from the Cold War to the 9/11 Era

Surveying recent scholarship, this article argues that human rights have succeeded in our time because powerful states have called them into being and endowed them with substantial force. Rather than seeing human rights as an epiphenomenon of the global politics of the 1970s, this essay places human rights in a longer historical trajectory and gives special attention to the era of the 1940s. Now that human rights have become ensconced in our politics, the challenge has been to implement human rights protections. Some commentators worry that human rights “interventions” simply hide neo-imperial ambitions and agendas of regime change. This essay argues by contrast that this “responsibility to protect” emerged directly from the historical evolution of the human rights idea since 1945.