The Endtimes of Human Rights

A passionate and provocative argument that the idea of universal human rights has become not only ill adapted to current realities but also overambitious and unresponsive.

Stephen Hopgood is Professor of International Relations, SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International, also from Cornell, and American Foreign Environmental Policy and the Power of the State.

This is a provocative, angry book–and an important one.... The book is particularly good on the link between human rights and liberalism, and how the larger the human rights non-governmental organization is, the greater the likelihood that it has been tamed by capital, existing to raise money rather than raising money to exist.... This is a disturbing read, the anger driving the narrative, the passion evident in every paragraph.

Clifford Bob:

In this scathing indictment of the human rights movement, Stephen Hopgood contends that it has sold out its moral clarity for an alliance with interventionist liberal states.... Hopgood's provocation is powerful, and his privileging of locally and nationally inspired activism rings true. He does an excellent job of drawing together specific incidents to support his controversial views.... The Endtimes of Human Rights is a bracing alert for human rights professionals and all who care about global ethics. Scholars, practitioners, and NGO contributors will need to reckon with this important book.

Hopgood's point of view, sure to be controversial, is argued with clarity, passion, and verve. Hopgood challenges those concerned with humanitarianism to look beyond Western-led human rights organizations, especially to activists working within their own communities, for hope. It seems certain that this book will cause both celebration and discomfort, even outrage, within the human rights community. Readers with an interest in human rights policy, humanitarianism, and even cultural history more broadly will find much to like in Hopgood's brisk, witty prose, even if they are discomfited by his arguments.

Brian R. Gilbert:

According to Hopgood, we are witnessing the last gasp of human rights as the prospect of one world under secular human law is receding and thefoundations of universal liberal norms and global governance are crumbling (p. 1). It is from this vantage point that Stephen Hopgood launches into a nuanced and powerful demolition of the normalising metanarrative of the Human Rights agenda.... [T]his is a compelling text as Hopgood grapples with issues of 'who gets to decide global rules' and who gets to define "legitimate exceptions to them" (p. 2). Further, we see Human Rights are not, and never have been, above the fray of national sovereignty as organisations and states have always sought to set the parameters of the political sphere and define who would be excluded from the outset.

Edward E. Andrews:

Christian Imperialism is a very welcome addition to the field of both missionary history and the history of the early American republic... For historians of missionsit shows that Americans were deeply involved in global missionary work well before they had officially crafted an overseas empire. For scholars of the early American republicit challenges that customary periodization of empire and demands that we look both within and beyond borders to recognize that the American past was never exclusively American.

Pierre Hassner:

[R]eadable and brilliantly written, as well as... [rich] in information... and... controversial but challenging ideas.

Daniel Philpott, University of Notre Dame:

This barnstormer of a book is both rigorous and a page-turner, both provocative and careful, both deconstructive and constructive. Stephen Hopgood challenges all fans of human rights with the prospect that the human rights movement is collapsing in its moral authority. Whether readers shake or nod their heads as they make their way through the pages—and I find myself doing both—they will find themselves engaged in a sparkling conversation with a lively intellect.

Samuel Moyn, Columbia University:

Human rights, Stephen Hopgood argues in this hard-hitting provocation, began as the last version of Europe's Christianity but was transformed into the imperial language of America's hegemony. Hopgood compellingly analyzes the mutation of advocacy from sentimental compassion at the grassroots level to 'international justice' among elites, preparing his powerful call for a return to the decentralized movement that first allowed humanism traction. The Endtimes of Human Rights suggests that when the church goes wrong, the time can come to call for a reformation or even to celebrate a Black Mass.

Janice Stein, Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, author of The Cult of Efficiency:

The Endtimes of Human Rights is a brilliant book. Stephen Hopgood puts forward an important and controversial argument about the cultural parochialism of the human rights regime and predicts that we are coming to the end of the 'church of human rights.' Drawing on cultural history, Hopgood traces the political foundations of humanitarianism as a parochial expression of European and especially Christian values, and its unconscious use of universal language to push forward the cultures and values of European Christianity. Hopgood takes us to the edge of a future where our comfortable and comforting language of human rights is unmasked for what it is: a language that grows out of particular cultures and historical circumstances at a time when these cultures are no longer dominant and circumstances have changed as power shifts in the global system. For many, this will come as an unpalatable, even shocking argument.