Description
For decades, framing an issue as a ‘human rights’ issue carried certain power and effect in politics and international relations, one that has been challenged by the recent rise of populist political forces. Ford explores the recent impact of populist politics on the universalist human rights project, in particular, how scholars have framed and responded to this challenge.
Ford offers a provocation to the human rights movement. Rather than ‘what have populists done to human rights?’, it asks ‘how did we, the human rights movement, do this to ourselves?’ How did fundamental protections for all become so easily scapegoated as ‘us and them,’ as claims of small, often foreign, minorities? Did human rights lose some vital connection to ordinary people’s interests, their value taken as obvious and self-explanatory?
Looking forward, the book asks how – in a post-truth ‘fake news’ world – we might reimagine human rights as underpinning human flourishing as well as important constraints on public and private concentrations of power. Traversing relevant scholarly literature on the future of human rights and zooming out to look at wider patterns of political and diplomatic discourse, this book will speak to policymakers, diplomats, journalists, and human rights advocates – and all interested in the crisis of liberal democracies.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Questions to explore
Outline of the book
Caveat, clarification, caution
I Patterns: ‘Populism’ and its claimed impact on human rights in recent times
Defining ‘populism’
Backslide
Backlash
II Problems: Putting the ‘populist challenge’ narrative in perspective
Couching the ‘populist era’ in some historical perspective
Enduring critiques or drawbacks of the human rights project
‘Distortive’
‘Disconnected’
‘Delegitimised’
III Progress?: Evaluating proposals to counter populism and revitalise human rights
Reframing
‘Populist backlash’ as blindness
‘Populist backlash’ as distraction
‘Populist backlash’ as window (of opportunity)
Reviewing
Prescriptions advanced for revitalisating human rights
Evaluating prescriptions for revitalisating human rights
Recalculating
Are human rights still powerful?
A persistent belief in the rights frame
Great expectations?
Questions of substance versus form
Conclusion
Index
