Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Among the resurgence in authoritarian populism around the globe, commitments to human rights agendas have been undermined in favor of a greater emphasis on sovereign interests and nativist concerns. These occurrences have urged some scholars to go as far to describe the current political moment as a transition to a post-human rights world. While that is not my position, these fears point to a question on how human rights found itself in such a precarious spot. I explore this premise with the assumption that the way rights were constructed throughout the twentieth century gave a ‘backdoor’ in which they could be desiccated at any point. This approach frames rights not as something that is linearly progressive but rather as a tenuous back-and-forth that is subject to backsliding if not appropriately attended to beyond the supposed panacea of legal positivism. I illustrate how structures of normative rights bear with them an element of negation which can ultimately unravel its originary aspirations. In thinking of the genealogy of what we know and think of rights in their modern context, we may draw its development alongside the integrative structures of liberal democracy and cosmopolitan internationalism. When viewed in this sense, global human rights were always subject to a reading of rights as bounded to a vertically oriented, technical implementation. Despite material gains and progress made via the adoption of norms, I press that modern human rights were effectively compromised from their inception and that they were unable to fulfill their aspirational promises.