Human rights are vital to making modernity work. This is a central claim in Jack Snyder’s book. It is featured more than once in its opening parts. In his closing, Snyder makes another audacious claim, when he writes, “Over the past centuries, liberal democratic states have been by far the best realists” (241). The book’s…
Tag: human rights
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-12 on Daly, Violent Victors
In Violent Victors, Sarah Zukerman Daly poses a question crucial to understanding what happens as countries emerge from civil war: Why does the winning side, whose hands are often stained with the blood of wartime atrocities, so often win the first postwar election? Daly’s answer is at once surprising and intuitive: beleaguered citizens, having endured…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-43 on Schmidli, Freedom on the Offensive
The reviews in this forum demonstrate that William Michael Schmidli’s Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and US Interventionism in the Late Cold War is an “impressive account,” as Molly Avery puts it, of how human rights and democracy promotion shaped US foreign policy in the late Cold War, specifically towards revolutionary Nicaragua….
Policy Series 2021-33: The Trump Administration’s Insidious Approach to Human Rights
As Donald J. Trump took office on January 20, 2017, observers expected little from his administration’s human rights policy – traditionally the extent to which government officials take account of human rights violations and protections as they formulate foreign policy. Specifically, few anticipated that the administration would weigh the human rights records of foreign governments…
Roundtable 9-14 on Dangerous Trade. Arms Exports, Human Rights, and International Reputation
Jennifer L. Erickson’s Dangerous Trade is a powerful reminder of the manifold ways in which arms control raises the most enduring questions in the study of international politics. The ability to regulate violence capacity on a given territory is central to the very idea of the modern state. The unfettered capacity to wield organized violence…
Policy Series: The Failed Promises of 1989 and the Politics of 2016
On the night of November 9, 1989, it was apparent to everyone on the scene in Berlin, and to spectators across the world, watching on TV, that history had reached a turning point. The ramifications of the opening of the Berlin Wall, as was also widely understood at the time, would not be limited to…
Policy Series: The Impact of the Trump Administration on U.S.-UK Relations
This essay is being written at the end of 2016, with the topic stimulating a series of reactions: bewilderment, then bemusement, then apprehension, then uncertainty, and, finally, curiosity. If President-elect Donald Trump himself knows what he truly plans to do – as opposed to what he would truly like to do – he has hidden…
Policy Series: Donald Trump and the Limits of Human Rights
The international human rights system, with its diverse global movements, is epoch-making, allowing stigma to be applied to errant states on matters of crucial global concern.[2] But promoting its exclusive relevance in the face of injustice, as if the alternative were apathy or despair, is simply not going to cut it.
Policy Series: Human Rights and the Trump Administration
Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” then presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a February 2016 campaign event in Bluffton, South Carolina. “Okay, folks, Torture—you know, half these guys [say]: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works, Okay?”[1] Whether or not the President-elect’s promise of a return to Bush era waterboarding (or forced deportations…
Review Essay 5 on The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and on Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism
Samuel Moyn’s study of human rights movements is a path-breaking book. It moves the study of human rights out of the realm of virtue and into the realm of politics. By desacralizing the subject, he has historicized it, and thereby has enabled us to measure the claims of human rights against other political claims and…