by VASUKI NESIAH
Today human rights is the dominant language for justice claimsof both social movements and states. It is the banner under which utopian projects seek audibility on the global stageand foreign policy initiatives strive for global legitimacy. With human rights invoked by boththose who captain the ships of globalization, and those who contest its terms and trajectory, internal tensions and contradictions have moved to the forefront. Some have celebrated thenexus between human rights and global governance as the triumphant culmination of efforts building a post-war consensus through cosmopolitan humanism. Others are considerably discomfited by the pervasiveness of human rights in emerging modes of governance. This discomfort was fueled by the fact that war proponents often invoked “human rights” as the grounds for intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Against this backdrop, Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia has reinvigorated the debate about why human rights became the anchor of political ethics. In his 2010 book, Moyn targets the sacred cows of the human rights era. Rather than see the rise of human rights as the unfolding of cosmopolitan progress, he situates it in the powerful synergy between transnational social movements and power politics in the Cold War moment. Moyn tells a story that stretches from the global repercussions of the dissolution of the Bolshevik experiment to the local dynamics ofpost-Nixon electoral cleansing in the United States that brought about Jimmy Carter’s unlikely candidacy. By re-historicizing the agendas that propelled the ascentof human rights, he draws attention to the political projects at stake when human rights are invoked to support or defeat a cause.
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