Competing for the Last Utopia?: The NIEO, Human Rights, and the World Conference for the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, June 1975

At the World Conference for the International Women’s Year (WCIWY), held in Mexico City, across June and July 1975, the evangelists of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) advocated a revolutionary transformation of the world economic system as the means for securing the rights of women. Coincident with the “breakthrough” era of global human rights mobilization, the NIEO presented a competitor vision of universal justice. Yet the NIEO sought to augment the southern state, deploying the internationalist language of rights and solidarity to enhance the status not of the citizen, but of the sovereign. This article addresses the interaction between the NIEO’s claims and the language and philosophy of human rights, with a focal point on the WCIWY, when these two languages, often commingled, began to fractionate into discrete projects.