Human Rights and Populism

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.

Autorentext

Professor Jolyon Ford re-joined the Australian National University (ANU) Law School in 2015 from research positions with the Royal Institute for International Affairs ('Chatham House') and the Global Governance Programme at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government. He has over 20 years' experience in over 30 countries, working on legal, human rights, and governance issues in government, an inter-governmental organisation, civil society, think tanks, and the private sector. He is the author of Regulating Business for Peace (Cambridge, 2015) and co-author of Regulatory Insights on Artificial Intelligence (Elgar, 2022). Born and educated in Zimbabwe, he holds degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), Cambridge University, and the ANU.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt

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