The Endtimes of Human Rights by Stephen Hopgood (review)

That human rights norms and claims are in crisis today is not in dispute. The climate for effective, let alone presumed, fair international human rights mobilizations and actions has deteriorated dramatically in the twenty-first century. As any newspaper headline shows, the institutional apparatus designed to safeguard people at risk is deployed only selectively and demands for justice and accountability are listened to sporadically. The 2003 United States invasion of Iraq showed just how seamlessly the post-Cold War project of “humanitarian intervention” morphed into unilateral war and occupation. The defense of sovereignty and national interests is loudly announced in international affairs. It is no wonder Stephen Hopgood writes that we are living today in the end times of human rights. With this book he joins an increasing number of interdisciplinary scholars who cast a critical eye on human rights histories and developments. Their operative language is more about entanglement, unintended consequences, the politics of life, and imperialist strategies of rule and bio-power. This marks a notable shift in scholarship away from the optimism and linear progressive interpretations of the 1990s, when human rights as a research topic first moved beyond its core amid political scientists and international law scholars. Hopgood’s book, indeed, is written for its times, with particularly trenchant insights into patterns and practices over the last several decades. But it is also problematical in its historical interpretations and sweeping arguments.

Hopgood states that his book is not a history: “It is an argument,”¹ perhaps even a polemic. That is correct; it is not a history, but not in the way he believes. He has written a grand narrative of the historical development of humanitarian practices all the way through to today’s ethical and political conundrums, replete with most of the trappings of historical methodology. It has a bounded chronology: the problems of today started in the mid-nineteenth century, (notably in 1863 with the Geneva conference), employing periodization, and developing transitional moments as, for example, in the decade of the 1970s. Most notably, Hopgood identifies a historical agent of change responsible for the emergence, development, and ongoing expansion of humanitarian sentiments and actions: the new European middle class or as he puts it, the “humanist,” who otherwise is not fully identified or anchored in his or her time or place.² His analysis is reminiscent of an older historical paradigm, which dominated the field of European history around the 1960s and 1970s, that saw European social and economic developments as the product of the “rise and rise” of its bourgeoisie. This Western figure now takes center stage in Hopgood’s analysis of global transformation.

The book, then, is not history in terms of the best practices of this field of inquiry. It is not attuned to the nuances and uncertainties of historical developments, to the “openness” of history, to its indeterminate and contingent nature and unclear paths. The book works internally because definitions are already fixed and given (usually by today’s understandings and interpretations). Humanitarianism is, he implies, rather than demonstrating the ways humanitarianism developed through fits and starts, slowly and always as a matter of contestation, as with many of its practices today. His diagnosis is not necessarily wrong (there is a lot of exciting and stimulating challenges in his analysis) but his interpretation is linear, automatic, and inevitable. Indeed, he charts today’s world as the outcome of a determined “political strategy” of the humanist (he gives a story with motive and plot) to amass ever greater power by transforming humanist norms (a “secular replacement for the Christian God”) into institutional and legal authority and eventually, effective colonizing global rules.³

His thesis, then, is quite straightforward: human rights has been turned into Human Rights by the agency of the Western European middle class, reinforced, yet at the same time transformed, in the1970s by US power with its new and fateful linkage to neoliberal democracy and state building. But he ascribes too much power to...