Rights and Neoliberalism

Revisionist human rights scholarship has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with an exponentially growing literature on neoliberalism that has done much to historicise a formerly muddled concept. Quinn Slobodian’s influential Globalists set a new standard in the study of neoliberalism by shifting discussion of it as an anti-state doctrine to how neoliberals advocated the strategic harnessing of state power to secure the economic domain from democratic interference. This dynamic becomes particularly clear in the field of rights. Slobodian explains how neoliberal intellectuals such as Friedrich von Hayek or Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann helped introduce human rights into international law as a means to secure private property and insulate economic activity against the social welfare-promoting activist state.Footnote ⁶ This argument fits well with Jessica Whyte’s claim that human rights served as fellow travellers alongside neoliberalism, and not merely as powerless companions of it, as adduced by Samuel Moyn in his 2018 Not Enough. The minimalist version of human rights that surged in the 1970s focused on safeguarding political and civil rights at the expense of social and economic rights. It fit with neoliberals’ defence of liberal rights and denigration of post-war welfarism and all social rights provisions in the 1948 UDHR.Footnote ⁷

The 2022 edited volume by Steven L.B Jensen and G. Charles Walton and the CHR-IV/V volumes considerably advance this debate. Rather than focusing exclusively on the limited neoliberal conception of rights, the contributions contained therein encyclopaedically interrogate the economic and social notions of human rights formulated by a wide cast of characters: eighteenth-century radicals, liberals, reactionaries and enslaved persons, nineteenth- and twentieth^-century socialists, feminists, the Catholic Church, imperial bureaucracies, postcolonial elites and philosophers. Their evidence counters the traditional charge that social and economic rights are a harbinger of totalitarianism: invented by the Jacobins during the terrorist phase of the French Revolution, continued by nineteenth-century socialists and operationalised under state socialism. Another central aim is demolishing the stadial view of rights history proposed by twentieth-century theorists such as T.H. Marshall and Karel Vašák, who explicitly relegated social and economic rights to an aspirational second tier in a system dominated by the primacy of securing political and civil rights.Footnote ⁸ Overall, the volumes reveal that social rights advocacy is as malleable and polysemic as other forms of rights advocacy. Finally, they significantly broaden the timeframe of inquiry by treating debates about social rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on their own merit rather than as mere prolegomena to the twentieth.

The overarching aim of the CHR-IV volume, edited by intellectual historian Dan Edelstein and political theorist Jennifer Pitts, is to situate the larger eighteenth and nineteenth centuries squarely in the history of human rights. The contributions question established wisdom. For instance, Edelstein credits the eighteenth-century predecessors of economic liberalism, the Physiocrats, with adopting an Augustinian social vision that accommodated the rights of the poor. Charles Walton shows how social rights fell into miscredit in the 1790s because bourgeois and radical revolutionaries alike failed to secure the appropriate funds to pay for them.Footnote ⁹ A less positive take on the Physiocrats by Martti Koskenniemi locates them at the start of a long tradition in human rights advocacy that situated the economy outside the realm of political contestation.Footnote ¹⁰ Gareth Stedman Jones’s contribution helpfully synthesises the various strands of radical and Hegelian thought that influenced Karl Marx’s famous rejection of rights as early as 1844. Jones demonstrates that even as Marx moderated his approach in the 1860s, he never substantially deviated from his fundamental rejection of a framework that in his view prioritised the individual over the community.Footnote ¹¹

Other contributions interrogate the notion that social rights carried an inherently progressive valence, the idea that social rights were conceptually distinct from their civil and political counterparts and finally the link between liberal rights and political modernisation. Glauco Schettini and G. Charles Walton show how counter-revolutionaries mobilised social rights in 1790s France against revolutionary individualist rights by claiming that all rights claims had to be embedded in the (God-fearing) collective.Footnote ¹² Stephen W. Sawyer and William J. Novak demonstrate that the French ancien régime pursued a range of socio-economic and political goals in its police practices, albeit in despotic ways incompatible with the drive for political and economic freedoms that impelled the revolutionary upheavals. Post-1789 police regimes in France and the United States also operated with notions of social welfare that made no strict distinction between the social/economic and the political/civil realms.Footnote ¹³ David Todd argues against the neo-institutional thesis that explains western Europe and North America’s superior economic development in the nineteenth century through the advancement of a range of property rights and economic liberties by governments allegedly committed to political liberalism. Todd traces instead a significant waxing and waning of economic liberalism’s fortunes at its supposed apogee, and the compatibility of liberal economic rights reactionary and absolutist politics, which served to forestall political liberalism.Footnote ¹⁴ Todd’s chapter complements Nicolas Delalande’s analysis of French, British and German labour movements, which envisioned social rights as inseparable from political rights. While socialist activists advanced a robust politico-socio-economic vision of rights, their deep distrust of the state led them to prioritise transnational, non-state forms to realise them – networks that ultimately proved helpless in the face of the expanding reach of state-based social provision.Footnote ¹⁵

The contributions focusing on the twentieth century make an emphasis on the causes for the demise of state-based social rights provisions, as theorised by thinkers such as T.H. Marshall and implemented by politicians such as Sir William Beveridge. Many scholars agree that social rights enjoyed a conjuncture thanks to the welfarist spirit from the 1930s that largely collapsed – with some Scandinavian exceptions – in the 1970s. Nostalgia for this welfarist spirit is most evident in Samuel Moyn, who has come to represent those who advocate for a radical solution: abandoning the international human rights system. Moyn believes that the rise of minimalist human rights in the 1970s was never intended to check the expansion of inequality and the end of welfarism. Since capitalism has domesticated human rights, Moyn maintains, it is hard to see how they could possibly challenge inequality, the climate crisis and other challenges associated with runaway capitalism.Footnote ¹⁶ Jessica Whyte strikes a similar note to Samuel Moyn in her contribution, which is instructive in disentangling left-wing from right-wing critiques of human rights, which she claims human rights defenders such as Philip Allston or Kathryn Sikkink lump together. Whyte sides with left-wing critics who would like to see the contemporary human rights regime replaced by more expansive visions focused on ending inequality but, like Moyn, does not explain why rights cannot be a part of this as of yet unarticulated vision.Footnote ¹⁷

Other contributors challenge the privileging of the western welfare state as a global standard that has been abandoned, and to which it must be returned. Laura Frader, for example, demonstrates the limitations of welfarist-inspired social rights by showing how French women were systematically excluded from economic citizenship, even with the slew of domestic and international social rights legislation after 1945.Footnote ¹⁸ Christian Olaf Christiansen and Steven L.B Jensen explain how postcolonial Global South states made crucial contributions to the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights adopted in 1966, which has often been seen as an example of the welfarist spirit. Unfortunately, the covenant lacked implementation mechanisms, put the onus on individual states and did not account for authoritarian developmentalism in the third world. Eventually, the gradual capture by neoliberal technocrats and politicians of positions of power at the international and national level between 1966 and 1975 dealt the death blow to the covenant’s welfarist aspirations by rethinking development along neoliberal lines.Footnote ¹⁹ Barbara Keys, by contrast, puts the onus on the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989/92, which created a new zeitgeist that enthroned political and civil rights and progressively weakened the enforcement of social rights provisions. But the post-1990 hierarchisation that prioritised political and civil rights, Keys argues, is not unique, because notwithstanding the oft-repeated paean to the indivisibility of human rights, the hierarchisation of rights has long been the norm in human rights politics.Footnote ²⁰

Scott Newton cautions fellow scholars not to interpret the Soviet Union’s provisions of ‘social rights’ as such. Soviet planners conceived of these provisions as a reward for contributions to the community, rather than the innate deserts of individuals or groups.Footnote ²¹ Bernard Thomas’s and Rosie Doyle’s chapters on Japan and Mexico respectively further provincialise the western welfare state model by demonstrating the strength of non-state actors in the provision of social rights in their case studies. Thomas shows how the Japanese state has abrogated the provision of social rights to private employers and families, a model that has come under significant strain given a steady economic decline and the exponential growth of the gig economy. Doyle points to how progressive grassroots religious organisations inspired by liberation theology helped give voice to indigenous liberation movements in regions such as Chiapas and even offered social provisions that the state refused to furnish.Footnote ²²

In a direct response to Moyn, Philipp Alston denies that there was ever a solid connection between welfarist politics (which at best existed in some western European countries and, more tenuously, in the United States) and the notions of social rights that animated the drafters of the UDHR. Alston challenges the notion that the spirit of welfarism expressed in the New Deal and similar programmes in western countries was robust, that it had equivalents across the globe and that it was exported to the world after 1945, which has been a mainstay of historical scholarship for at least thirty years.Footnote ²³ For Alston, the social rights of 1948 were a universalist vision independent of the historical context, and they continue to animate the work of human rights practitioners today. Alston charges critics such as Moyn with ignoring the extensive work to redress extreme inequality by the UN, human rights NGOs and European Union bodies, especially after the year 2000.Footnote ²⁴

Instead of denying links between welfarism and 1940s human rights instruments or projecting onto the UDHR a political programme it may have never had, future scholars could examine how social rights developed amid a shifting welfarist consensus. Sara Silverstein’s contribution, for instance, demonstrates that social rights faced impediments long before the neoliberal breakthrough in the 1970s. Racism weakened social rights provisions inside countries (e.g., for African Americans in the United States). Cold War politics enervated the World Health Organization and UNICEF, whose work in the Communist Bloc or in British colonies was perceived as deleterious to western interests. The rise of neoliberalism, Silverstein’s evidence shows, merely worked to accelerate extant dynamics.Footnote ²⁵ Historians of contemporary Europe in particular might opt for a similar approach to investigate how xenophobia and Cold War dynamics impacted social rights protections in Europe, and how these dynamics interacted with the neoliberal turn.

Rights, Genocide and Memory

The memory of the Holocaust was long seen as a major contributor to the drafting of the UDHR and the emergence of a cosmopolitan human rights culture until revisionist critics pointed out the paucity of awareness about the Holocaust during the drafting of the UDHR and the belated emergence of a truly universal human rights culture.Footnote ²⁶ Coming from a genocides studies angle, A. Dirk Moses’s The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression introduces a paradigm shift in thinking about the connection between genocide, mass violence and human rights abuses. Moses advances the concept of permanent security, subdivided in liberal and illiberal variants. ‘Permanent security’ is the imperative of a state to eliminate all threats to a populace it considers its own, in the present and for eternity. Targets are identified by their racial and cultural otherness. The desire for permanent security is the source for the massive scale of state violence since the start of European colonialism in the sixteenth century, although Moses acknowledges that there were earlier iterations of permanent security in ancient empires. Illiberal proponents of permanent security identified their enemies and legitimised their destruction as necessary for national survival by staging their wholesale obliteration, with the Holocaust as a prime example. Liberal proponents are different in that they emphasise their commitment to toleration, human rights and anti-racism. But to achieve these goals they are willing destroy innocent lives in the process, for instance as in the War on Terror perpetrated by the United States and its allies after 9/11.

Moses’s main argument is that the concept of genocide is insufficient to counter permanent security. This is because genocide is so narrowly defined that it puts an impossibly high threshold on instances of mass murder to be recognised as such. Moses undertakes an in-depth genealogical study of the concept’s emergence from the pen of the Polish-Jewish émigré lawyer and activist Rafael Lemkin. Moses’s intent here is twofold: he seeks to first demonstrate that Lemkin’s contribution was not original, and second, he identifies the political visions that animated Lemkin’s coining of genocide in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). Moses argues convincingly that Lemkin’s concept of genocide deploys the tropes of the ‘language of transgression’, which is the use of charged language to shock the conscience of humanity by deeming massacres as contra natura. Moses also argues, provocatively, that Lemkin consciously tailored the concept to fit a very narrow form of illiberal permanent security, for example, Nazi crimes against the Jews as an example of an over-mighty, criminal state seeking to eliminate a defenceless group in its entirety. He did this out of political opportunism, mainly to curry favour with Allied governments who were invested in making sure that their wartime actions could not fall under the umbrella of genocide. Lemkin’s reasons also included his commitment to a Mazzinian ‘ontology of humanity as first and foremost comprising ethnic nations’ and his Zionism, which meant that Lemkin did not wish to create legal tools that could be utilised against Israel.Footnote ²⁷

Crucially, Moses claims that this narrow and depoliticised definition of genocide cannot properly account for most instances of mass murder. As long as states can claim that killing civilians is legitimate if they can be categorised as collateral damage in a just war against armed groups operating in their midst, liberal permanent security will be the continued source of countless human rights abuses. Thus, genocide and calls of ‘never again’ can be readily mobilised to commit state crimes against civilians under the banner of a new civilising mission. Despite this crucial flaw, genocide’s hegemonic status – since the Genocide Convention of 1948 enthroned the concept in international law – has forced human rights advocates from all over the world to try to stretch this inelastic concept to accommodate poorly fitting instances of mass murder such as the Israel –Palestine conflict, ethnopolitical conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia or crimes committed during the colonial era. Predictably, their efforts have been dismissed on the grounds that these conflicts, however terrible, are not genocides.Footnote ²⁸ Moses’s criticism of genocide echoes Samuel Moyn’s dismissal of human rights as insufficient to confront current abuses.

Andrew I. Port’s Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust has an entirely different take on the uses of Holocaust memory to render current atrocities legible. Port interrogates how West Germany and East Germany came to frame instances of mass murder in the Global South through the lens of the Holocaust. The main argument here is that Germans paid close attention to genocides and instances of mass human rights abuses in places such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Rwanda and often invoked a special duty to oppose mass murder in these regions because of (rather than despite) their country’s genocidal past. This must be interpreted as a rejoinder to Moses that a focus on the uniqueness of the Holocaust has not prevented Germans or other liberal states from recognising other instances of mass murder.

The story that Port traces is replete with the ways in which Germans in both east and west, elite and non-elite, mobilised the memory of the Shoah to prod a reticent political establishment to recognise and act against instances of mass murder. In the case of Cambodia, West and East German ruling elites refused to indict Cambodian strongman Pol Pot’s rule as genocidal because of Cold War considerations and not because of the paradigm of Holocaust memory that emerged at that exact time. West Germany refrained from criticising the mass murders perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime to avoid jeopardising its nascent relations with China and because of hostility to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese state that eventually overthrew Pol Pot. East Germany maintained the secrecy of its highly critical internal reports of the atrocities in Cambodia to avoid handing western cold warriors more ammunition. It was only through the efforts of critical media outlets, Christian Democratic politicians keen to indict a communist regime, the heightened level of attention to instances of genocide that resulted from the 1979 television series Holocaust in West Germany and, in East Germany, the overthrow of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese intervention in late 1978, that the Cambodian genocide became an openly discussed matter in both Germanys, with the Shoah serving as the primary frame of reference for those attempting to make sense of the killing.

While Port is primarily responding to the scholarship on genocide and German memory, his book has important insights that pertain to the history of human rights politics in the 1990s. Port deftly lays out the discussions about lifting the weapons embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in 1991, conducting humanitarian intervention in the Balkans and out of area operations of the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr). Motivated by a desire to prevent new genocides, the slogan of ‘Never Again Auschwitz’ collided with ‘Never Again War’ in the 1990s as Germans debated how to respond to the violence perpetrated by Serbia (and Bosnian Serbs) against Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Croats and Kosovars, and Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda. Exactly how Germany could contribute to the prevention of genocide, whether through economic and diplomatic pressure or outright military intervention, as Green Party politician Joshka Fischer advocated, was the source of vitriolic debates in and out of the German parliament (Bundestag).

Port’s book features an impressive array of archival and oral history sources, including high-ranking politicians such as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. But this source base does lead the author to prioritise the views of high-ranking politicians and the media over civil society. The reader learns a great deal about what major media outlets editorialised or what high-ranking CDU/CSU or SPD politicians thought about genocide in the 1990s, but there is very little about what readers, voters or, for that matter, critical civil society voices had to say. Taking their views into account might have challenged Port’s insistence that Germans framed their responses to human rights abuses abroad primarily by invoking their domestic history, as opposed to more universalistic frameworks. Politicians and media outlets tend to frame their arguments in ways clearly legible to a national audience. Civil society actors and activists, especially if they are transnationally linked, are at more liberty to adopt other forms of messaging. Equally useful would have been to learn how Vietnamese refugees and Bosnian asylum seekers experienced German hospitality, and whether the instances of racism that Port mentions, but does not closely analyse, do not detract from the fundamentally positive story presented here. Only by taking those views into account can one really ascertain whether German memory work, as it has historically developed, can be deemed as ‘undeniably beneficial’ as the book asserts.Footnote ²⁹

Rights and Eurocentrism

Charges of Eurocentrism against the international human rights system are not novel. Famously, then Saudi representative Jamil Baroody rejected the 1948 UDHR because of its barely concealed western scaffolding, well before the rulers of Malaysia and Singapore reprised these charges during the Asian Values debate of the 1990s.Footnote ³⁰ Revisionist scholarship has also been criticised for allegedly furthering an Eurocentric perspective in focusing on the actions of western governments and human rights NGOs at the expense of human rights visions stemming from the Global South.Footnote ³¹ In response, post-revisionist scholars have devoted attention to the contribution of the Global South to human rights debates and international law.Footnote ³²

One of the pillars of Eurocentric scholarship is the notion of ‘Oriental Despotism’, whereby concentration of economic power in populous Asian empires enabled an uninhibited form of political authoritarianism that violated individual freedoms, thereby arresting economic and political development, including the development of any idea of human rights.Footnote ³³ In his contribution to CHR-IV, Hasan Zahid Siddiqui disputes this stubborn thesis by analysing contemporary observers who sympathised with the ruling practices of Mughal imperial rule for its laissez faire approach towards governance. Siddiqui helpfully demonstrates how rights notions under the Mughals occurred in the context of royal protections and religious milieus, marking a fundamentally different approach to rights from the one advanced by latter anti-imperial and postcolonial advocates.Footnote ³⁴

Lauren Benton and Jane Burbank make a similar point about the plasticity of rights claims in imperial settings. In their comparison of rights regimes in the British, Spanish and Russian empires, they find how multiple sets of rights were often invoked by members of subordinate groups against each other. Consequently, references to rights tended to be framed in discrete terms compatible with imperial authority.Footnote ³⁵ In context of colonial North America, Saliha Belmessous interprets rights mainly as a colonial tool that facilitated the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ independent land-holding traditions. While the British and French empires willingly gave indigenous peoples equal rights, it was to facilitate their entry into a system under the control of the settler state that resulted in their subjugation.Footnote ³⁶ By contrast, Philip Kaisary points to the Haitian Revolution as a source of innovation in social rights legislation and praxis, albeit in capacious and non-consistent ways that accommodated authoritarian and paternalist forms of rule under revolutionary leaders such as Toussaint L’Ouverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines.Footnote ³⁷

Another central argument that recent scholarship has successfully disputed is the claim that postcolonial regimes cynically enthroned the principle of self-determination with the aim of allowing them to disregard individual rights once in power. Instead, these scholars have demonstrated that anti-colonial leaders radically opposed a hierarchy that prioritised individual political and civil rights in order to relegate economic/social, and especially collective, rights to lesser ranks.Footnote ³⁸ The chapters reviewed here expand on this thesis, while weaving rights into histories of empire and anti-imperial struggle.

The bourgeoning scholarship on the pan-nationalist movements that flourished in Asia, the Muslim world and the Afro-Caribbean world to resist imperialism and racism has largely ignored the question of rights.Footnote ³⁹ This makes Cemil Aydin’s chapter particularly valuable. Pan-nationalism (African, Asian and Muslim) was not initially an anti-imperial movement for national self-determination but rather a reformist, rights-seeking movement to improve the status of subjects within European empires. Thinkers and activists deployed the language of rights as a common language by which to entreat their European overlords to recognise their rights in the name of civilisation. Their failure propelled reformist rights politics into a decline that accelerated with Russia’s 1905 defeat by the Japanese, which midwifed an increasingly violent turn against empire. Nevertheless, efforts to conduce European audiences to take rights seriously did not entirely disappear and furnished an influential intellectual legacy for twentieth-century anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial governance.Footnote ⁴⁰

But, as Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro’s contribution to CHR-V demonstrates, the French, British, Belgian and Portuguese empires never seriously considered granting equal rights to their African subjects. Instead, they strictly adhered to ‘legal pluralism’ practices that excluded non-citizen ‘indigénes’ from the rights that white settlers enjoyed.Footnote ⁴¹ This is similar to a point made by Meredith Terretta, who demonstrates that if colonialism was ‘built upon systematic curtailment of the socio-economic rights of indigenous populations as colonial law codified the distribution and use of their land’, then the use of rights arguments by African subjects was a form of anti-colonial resistance. Terretta’s case study focuses on efforts in the internationally supervised territories in Togo and Tanganyika to reclaim land usurped by German imperialism, a practice upheld and expanded under the British mandate. Terretta shows how the British and other colonial powers holding trusteeships consistently worked to exclude Africans from human rights protections, while colonial courts ruled against their claims. Indigenous Africans were forced to acquire land with cash and rely on individual freehold practices that wreaked havoc on the pre-existing moral economy of these regions.Footnote ⁴²

Scholarship by Rachel M. Johnston-White and Salar Mohandesi stand for a growing number of works that demonstrate that those most likely to invoke human rights against empire with some measure of success did so from within the core. Johnston-White analyses how left-wing Catholic opponents of the torture practices during the Algerian War invoked their conscience against their reactionary political and religious opponents. Dissident Catholics’ use of conscience against torture was unique because they opposed reactionary Catholics who endorsed the use of torture as a legitimate tool to combat communism and terrorism in Algeria, but also explicitly refused to invoke the secular principles presented in the 1948 UDHR. Moreover, dissidents faced substantial backlash from the French military and church authorities who claimed the guardianship of French conscience for themselves. Johnston-White contributes to a flourishing scholarship on Christian human rights that has questioned the established view that Christian notions of human rights were fundamentally conservative and introduced reactionary notions into post-war European human rights laws and practices.Footnote ⁴³ If anything, she convincingly shows, human rights and conscience could be invoked for diametrically opposed political projects.

Whereas in Johnston-White’s account Algeria and its tortured natives remain mute objects of advocacy, in Salar Mohandesi’s manuscript, anti-colonial Vietnamese fighters are important as both symbols of resistance and active agents. Moreover, detailed investigations of human rights during the period of decolonisation have focused largely on Africa, which makes Mohandesi’s focus on Southeast Asia particularly valuable.Footnote ⁴⁴ The author starts with a lengthy analysis of the conundrum facing early twentieth-century anti-colonial communist movements such as Vietnam’s, which professed the internationalist idea of communism while fighting to establish a sovereign nation-state. Mohandesi seems to suggest that the political strategy chosen by Vietnamese communists – but which he ultimately attributes to Lenin and not Ho Chi Minh – constrained solidarity activism with Vietnam. Radical anti-war activists in France and the United States engaged in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle because they opposed their respective governments’ brutal military repression of a legitimate demand for self-determination, but soon they developed an affinity with the goals of the Vietnamese struggle and with the project of global communist revolution. As part of these solidarity practices, human rights advocacy crept into their vocabulary. Radical activists utilised human rights languages to highlight the abuses that the pro-US government of South Vietnam was committing against imprisoned Vietcong fighters and South Vietnamese dissidents. But this turn, argues Mohandesi, came at the cost of the radical goals of promoting revolution, turning their advocacy into a humanitarian campaign: ‘Instead of heroic subjects fighting for their collective liberation, the Vietnamese people were increasingly recast as a lot of miserable victims in need of saving’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Mohandesi argues that anti-imperialism lost its status as the dominant framework of internationalist advocacy as it could not cope with the twin challenges that befell it in the first half of the 1970s. On the one hand, a socio-economic polycrisis struck the capitalist North Atlantic to which traditional Marxist theory could not effectively respond. On the other hand, as newly reunified Vietnam started to transform the country and made foreign policy initiatives in the region – such as overthrowing the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia – former internationalists turned against Hanoi on human rights grounds. Both developments fractured the anti-imperialist alliance and opened the field to conservative and liberal politicians in France and in the United States eager to compensate for their failed imperialist adventures in Southeast Asia. Mohandesi strikes here a similar note to earlier scholarship, signalling a sharp break between Tiers Mondisme and Sans Frontierisme and a right-wing turn in human rights politics.Footnote ⁴⁶ But he goes even further in putting the blame on formerly left-leaning activists such as Joan Baez for playing the game of western capitalist states. Moreover, augmenting this earlier scholarship, Mohandesi’s account pays close attention to the arguments proposed by Vietnamese officials. They are presented not as cynical strategists but rather as largely discomfited by the salience of human rights, evidenced by the lack of a unified strategy to respond to outside criticism. Eventually, he argues, these officials ‘found themselves accepting the very terms of their enemies . . . the idea of human rights had become so commonsensical . . . that everyone felt compelled to present their arguments within its framework’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Mohandesi’s choices of Vietnam as a case study and his focus on western activists limit its representativity. The contributions to CHR-V by Umut Özsu, Alden Young, Tinashe Nyamund, Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp take a more global approach to examine how the principles of self-determination and development evolved alongside human rights in response to international power asymmetries. Self-determination may have had European roots, but Özsu reminds the reader that the concept underwent a profound reimagination by anti-colonial activists aligned with the 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1970s G77 campaign for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Yet, the radical potential of this movement was undermined by slow economic progress, opposition from the Global North and austerity programmes from technocratic institutions like the IMF and World Bank. As the NIEO’s ambitions faded, legal formalism gained ground. Uruguayan UN rapporteur Hector Gros Espiell’s 1980 report, which Özsu examines in detail, typifies this shift by presenting a depoliticised definition of self-determination that prioritised territorial sovereignty over demands for economic justice.Footnote ⁴⁸

Internal challenges and external resistance also played a central role in thwarting the newly liberated nations’ visionary progressive projects, according to Alden and Nyamund’s chapter. One important reason they highlight for postcolonial developmentalism’s autocratic turn was its grounding on economics. This framework, they argue, forced postcolonial nations into path-dependent trajectories that mirrored their experience under colonial rule. Moreover, the nation-state became the agent tasked with postcolonial development, as opposed to supranational or regional institutions that might have been more resilient to foreign pressure, and it was often captured by elites wedded to particular religious or ethnic interests. Under these conditions, in fragile states such as Sudan or Zimbabwe, development morphed into a technocratic vision that prioritised the needs of ruling elites over the populations they ruled, leading to a cycle of abuses against civic, political, economic and social rights.Footnote ⁴⁹

Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp’s fine-grained analysis offers a more hopeful reading of Cold War–era human rights politics. They trace the genesis of regional initiatives in Africa and Latin America – particularly the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights, the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights or the 1981 African Charter – with regional human rights initiatives in Europe serving as a comparative foil. Their argument is that much of Cold War–era human rights work took place at the intermediate level between the nation-state and the international community. These intermediate, regional initiatives not only endured but also continue to perform the crucial task of vernacularising human rights law. This vernacularising has also contributed to a shift in perspective about the relationship between civil, political, social and economic rights, which they have enshrined as co-constitutive, a perspective that more closely reflects the collective legal and political customs of these regions.Footnote ⁵⁰ Taken together, the literature discussed in this section has eroded the Eurocentric framing of previous scholarly work by showcasing the complexity of human rights politics in imperial, revolutionary and postcolonial settings.