Donald Trump’s victory creates serious risks and challenges for human rights globally, but this victory could have an unexpected positive effect: to push the human rights movement to carry out transformations in its architecture and changes in its strategy that were imperative even before Trump, and that are now urgent.
Before the decline of the global Anglo-American order, reflected in Brexit, Trump, and the proliferation of illiberal nationalisms across the world, the answers that many analysts and practitioners in the human rights movement offered tended to be grouped in two extremes: skepticism and defensiveness. The skeptics announced the “end times” of the international project of human rights, based on a view that human rights were imposed by Euro-America. Given this view, the end of Pax Americana will also be the end of the movement, as Stephen Hopgood writes. His work is thought provoking and inexact in equal parts, and it forgets that this regime was built in part with the ideas and the pressure of states and movements of the global South, from those who created the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man in 1948 to postcolonial nations that pushed for treaties against racial and religious discrimination in the sixties.
Skeptics also rely on an incomplete reading of the global impact of the movement. For example, even if Samuel Moyn is right in claiming that the impact of international law on the American civil rights struggle is negligible, generalizing to the rest of the world is empirically inaccurate. It runs counter to abundant evidence that the making and implementation of international norms such as those enshrined in the UN Durban Declaration or the Convention against Racial Discrimination have—in combination with domestic political and legal mobilization—made key contributions to advancing the cause of racial justice in countries around the world. More generally, Anglo-American skeptics tend to miss myriad processes of “vernacularization” whereby international human rights have been incorporated into national constitutions, policies, court decisions, and social movement’s frames and repertoires of contention.
