Human rights — and the international institutions that strive to protect them — are under increasing attack from powerful actors on the global stage, from recent political trends even within established democracies and from new technologies. Together, these threats have undermined what had been a fragile international consensus as recently as two decades ago about the importance of concerted international action to protect human rights and punish those who abuse them. China, Russia, and other nondemocratic regimes have become increasingly bold in acting as if agreed-upon international human rights standards no longer exist, or at least do not apply to them. More broadly, domestic political movements based on nationalism, religion, and populism are challenging human rights norms on nearly every continent. And new technologies — including autonomous weapons systems and relentless digital surveillance — have given national leaders new ways to control or even abuse their citizens with impunity. This book examines these new challenges to international and regional human rights in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It is the result of a year of workshops with human rights activists and young leaders from around the world, with chapters written by a diverse group of leading scholars. Beyond describing the challenges to human rights, the book offers targeted, practical recommendations for national and multilateral policymakers, activists, and scholars for concrete actions to protect human rights as well as improve public understanding of why doing so is essential. Reclaiming Human Rights in a Changing World Order will interest scholars of international relations and human rights law, domestic and international activists involved in human rights — indeed, anyone wanting to understand the implications for the liberal international order of the new geopolitical competition, modern technology, and political and social movements.

Preface.

Bringing Human Rights Back: Embracing Human Rights as a Mechanism for Addressing Gaps in United States Law examines well-documented policy failures in the United States and makes an argument for how a human rights approach to these issues can lead to meaningful change. Specifically, the authors articulate a human rights approach to online harassment of women, child poverty, and access to safe drinking water. These issue areas all involve human rights concerns and gross shortcomings within current law, policy, and practice in the United States. The authors analyze recent events, such as Gamergate, contention over social programs such as TANF and CHIP, and the water crises in Flint and Detroit to demonstrate the ways in which current laws do not fully respect, protect, and fulfill human rights. A human rights approach decenters assigning blame or liability, and instead emphasizes human dignity, redress, and remedy for the rights violations. Daniel Tagliarina and Corinne Tagliarina not only highlight the need for change in these areas, but outline a practical way forward rooted in human rights scholarship and practice.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Critical Perspectives on Human Rights provides cutting-edge interventions into contemporary perspectives on rights, ethics and global justice. The chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, make a significant and timely contribution to critical human rights scholarship by interrogating the significance of human rights for critical theory and practice. While the contributions engage sensitively yet thoroughly with the regulatory, disciplinary, and exclusionary effects of human rights, they do so without giving up on the transformative potential of human rights. By thinking productively through the exclusions, paradoxes and aporias of human rights, Critical Perspectives on Human Rights is a key reference text for students and scholars in this important area of inquiry.

"Reclaiming the Great World House in the 21st Century: Cross-Disciplinary Explorations of the Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., does just that. Established and emerging scholars explore Martin Luther King, Jr.'s global vision and his lasting relevance to a globalized rights culture. The editors further explain that this edited collection looks at: King afresh in his own historical context, while also refocusing his legacy of ideas and social praxis in broader directions for today and tomorrow. Employing King's metaphor of "the great world house," with major attention to racism, poverty, and war - or what he called 'the evil triumvirate"--the focus is on King's appraisal of and approach to the global-human struggle in the 1950s and 60s, and on the extent to which his social witness and praxis takes on new hues and pertinence not only in the ongoing struggles against racism, poverty and economic injustice, and violence and human destruction, but also in the mounting efforts to eliminate problems such sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry and intolerance from the global landscape. The conclusion is that King's ideas and models of social protest are not only alive but also growing in vitality and popularity in the 21st century, especially as humans worldwide are struggling daily with the lingering, antiquated thinking and behavior around race and ethnicity, the widening gap between "the haves" and "the have-nots," the mounting cycles of violence, torture, and terrorism, and the frustrating and growing chasms resulting from religious pluralism and the subordination and marginalization of certain sectors of the human family based on gender and sexuality"--

Can universal human rights and different national citizenship regimes ever be compatible? This book argues that they can't, setting out a legal-philosophical critique of the tension between both. It explores whether the emergence of postnational models of citizenship that aim at decoupling human rights and citizenship succeed in overcoming tensions between the universal (multiculturalism; universal human rights; postnational values) and the particular (citizenship; borders; national values and diverse local narratives). As a result of this exploration, the author argues that it is illegitimate to speak of universal human rights, universal human dignity, or universal social justice. It is only by recognising this reality that a much needed transformation of human rights and citizenship can be undertaken in a meaningful way. This provocative and compelling work will appeal to both human rights and citizenship lawyers, as well as others involved in human rights law at NGOs, governments, international organisations – and indeed anyone with an interest in the subject of how human rights evolved and new concepts for the future.

This book is devoted to the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development. It contains a collection of analytical studies of various aspects of the right to development, which include the rule of law and good governance, aid, trade, debt, technology transfer, intellectual property, access to medicines and climate change in the context of an enabling environment at the local, regional and international levels. It also explores the issues of poverty, women and indigenous peoples within the theme of social justice and equity. The book considers the strides that have been made over the years in measuring progress in implementing the right to development and possible ways forward to make the right to development a reality for all in an increasingly fragile, interdependent and ever-changing world.

For over twenty-five years, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been depicted by the media as a nation in turmoil. Armed militias and armies ravage villages, stealing crops and minerals, while proxy wars displace countless citizens. Political violence, corruption, and social insecurity plague the nation, leading to a humanitarian crisis where fundamental human rights are routinely violated. This book delves into the harrowing realities of life in Congo, where public education and healthcare are in shambles, and most people live on less than two dollars a day. Amidst this, political leaders enjoy exorbitant salaries while public servants endure poverty. This empirical research critically examines the gap between the constitutional provisions of human rights and their implementation, presenting stark indicators of a failed state. By analyzing the human rights situation from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the current state Constitution, the book reveals the Congo’s descent into chaos and calls for accountability for its violations.

Populism is a growing threat to human rights. They are appropriated, distorted, turned into empty words or even their opposite. The contributors to this volume examine these practices using the example of freedom of religion or belief, a human right that has become a particular target of right-wing populists and extremists worldwide. The contributions not only show the rhetorical patterns of appropriation and distortion, but also demonstrate for various countries which social dynamics favor the appropriation in each case and propose how to strengthen human rights and the culture of debate in democratic societies.