The Human Rights Project and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Rights

• In Event: Theories of Human Rights

Abstract

How and why did human rights become so contentious? In this paper I argue that the complexity and multiplicity of human rights have been obscured in the shadow of the Human Rights Project—the global advancement of an international regime of legalized human rights and humanitarianism built on liberal economic, political, and philosophical foundations, anchored in the UN system, and backed by the militarized and soft power of liberal democratic capitalist states and their corporate, philanthropic, and international NGO partners. In and through the Human Rights Project, human rights have been configured as cosmopolitan: as natural, universal, transcendent, liberal, and juridical. I show how this cosmopolitan conception of human rights was normalized in the 1990s and argue that the most intractable debates over human rights—debates about their origins, their universality, and their political character—perdure because of a mistaken but ubiquitous assumption about the singularity of this cosmopolitan conception of rights.

Author

• Michael Goodhart, University of Pittsburgh