One vision of human rights sees their future as one of increasing influence, compliance, and impact, where global institutions like the ICC, R2P, and the emerging Convention on Crimes Against Humanity yield genuine improvements in the everyday lives of people all over the world. In this talk, I express significant scepticism about this utopian picture for two principal reasons. First, sovereignty, far from being tamed, is making a comeback, aided in part by the relative decline of Western power and influence. Second, religion, too, is back (not that it ever went away), unavoidably creating a fault line on major social and political issues with human rights advocates for whom the prize is a world of independent, autonomous, and free individuals with the power to veto any and all collective authorities. More law is not the answer. The toleration of substantial diversity will I argue be unavoidable, while the privileging of local mobilization, along with the development of middle class constituencies, is the most promising avenue for normative change. More economic growth, not human rights, in other words, is the place to start.
Stephen Hopgood is professor of international relations and co-director of the Centre for the International Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice (CCRJ) at SOAS. He is also the associate dean for research in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences. From 2009-2012, he held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship which culminated in the book, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). This follows on from his ethnography of Amnesty International, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), which won the American Political Science Association Best Book in Human Rights Award in 2007. He is also the author of "Moral authority, modernity and the politics of the sacred," European Journal of International Relations, 15/2, 2009, and more recently of "The last rites of humanitarian intervention: Darfur, Sri Lanka and R2P," Global Responsibility to Protect, 6/2 (2014). Professor Hopgood is also a regular contributor to the website openGlobalRights, where his blog posts include "Human rights: Past their sell-by date?" available at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/stephen-hopgood/human-rights-past-their-sell-by-date.