Whose Utopia?

Human Rights, Development, and the Third World

antony anghie

In this provocative and stimulating book, Samuel Moyn boldly

states that his intention is to provide a true history of human
rights in order to confront their prospects today and in the fu-
ture.1 Moyns basic argument is that international human rights is
a relatively new invention. Whereas other histories have insisted on
seeing human rights as a manifestation and refinement of a set of
ideas that could be traced back to natural law and the French and
American Revolutions, Moyn insists that it was not until 1977,
when Jimmy Carter embraced human rights, making it an inte-
gral part of US foreign policy, that international human rights law
emerged in its distinctive modern form (LU, 155). In pursuit of this
project, Moyn outlines a non-teleological reading of human rights
that focuses on the real conditions for historical developments
that led to the emergence of modern human rights law (LU, 12). He
explores how human rights became the central language of moral
authority for the expression of international idealism and the man-
agement of world affairs. He seeks to distinguish between human
rights and other distinctive globalisms and internationalisms
(LU, 14). Further, and most interestingly for me, Moyn argues that
this modern version of human rights emerged in the context of
what he asserts was a crisis of utopianism (LU, 9).2
64 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

On reflection, Moyns work powerfully elaborates upon and ex-

plores an intuition that I suspect many human rights scholars and
activists have shared but rarely pursued: the intuition that the dis-
tinctiveness of contemporary human rights lies in the prominence
it now enjoys in international relations and international law and,
more broadly, in theorizing about the character of international
justice. It is telling that virtually every major initiative in recent
times has in some way or another claimed an affiliation with the
language of human rights. Entities such as the International Labor
Organization and the United Nations High Commission for Refu-
gees have a long history of promoting human rights, but in more
recent times, even unlikely entities that once sought to distance
themselves from any connection with human rights have now
claimed to promote them, as is the case with the World Bank.3 En-
vironmental issues, labor issues, and economic issues are presented
in terms of rights or, otherwise, at least asked to justify themselves
in terms of their impact on rights. A large amount of literature
deals with the issue, for instance, of whether the World Trade Or-
ganization violates human rights. But this in itself suggests that
human rights is central to any global initiative, whether as legiti-
mation or justification, on the one hand, or else resistance, on the
other. The tendency in recent times is to present every sort of claim
in the language of rightswe now have first-generation rights,
second-generation rights, and third-generation rights (among the
latter is the right to peace). As Professor Louis Henkin, who fea-
tures prominently in this book, asserts, Ours is the age of rights.
Human rights is the idea of our time, the only political-moral idea
that has won universal acceptance.4 Moyns work can be read as
an attempt to understand how the situation that his distinguished
predecessor at Columbia outlined came to be.
In this attempt, it seems to me, Moyn makes at least two impor-
tant arguments: the first has to do with the emergence of a distinc-
tive model of human rights, and the second is a broad claim that
this distinctive model emerged as a result of the exhaustion of all
alternative concepts of utopia, hence the title, The Last Utopia.
One of the most striking features of Moyns argument is its skillful
presentation of a history of human rights that persuasively chal-
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 65

lenges conventional narratives and relationshipsfor instance, the

orthodoxy that the campaign against genocide was an integral as-
pect of the human rights movement. My interest, then, lies in out-
lining the particular character of Moyns approach, the paradigm
he uses to present a fresh vision of the history of human rights. For
these purposes I will contrast his historical approach with what
might be termed the doctrinal approach adopted by interna-
tional law scholars and their version of the antecedents of human
rights law. But in sketching this contrast, I also want to suggest
that Moyns implicit model of how human rights came to emerge
in 1977 may be in some ways contestable because of how it pres-
ents the relationship between the development of doctrine and the
model of human rights he presents. I also focus on what might be
seen as different views of utopia as they existed at the time. Here
I am concerned with what was happening in the Third World as
human rights emerged.
Moyn argues that historians have adopted a church history, a te-
leological approach that fails to understand the peculiar character
of modern human rights and the contingency of their emergence.
Much of the originality and skill inherent in Moyns work lies in
his demonstration of the distinctiveness of modern human rights.
To international law and human rights scholars, the distinctive-
ness of modern human rights is not a novel idea. Henkin, for in-
stance, argues, The idea that human rights has received currency
and universal (if nominal) acceptance in our day owes much to
these antecedents [natural rights, the French and American Decla-
rations] but it is discrete and different from them (AR, 2). Henry
Steiner, another legal scholar writing at the same time and in re-
sponse to Henkin, provided his own vision of this distinctiveness:
Perhaps the boldest innovation of the human rights movement
consists in subjecting a states treatment of its own citizens to inter-
national law and the monitoring functions of international institu-
tions. Never before has the international legal system so dramati-
cally expanded its reach into the day to day life of sovereign states
and in so brief a period of time.5 Legal scholarship has largely
focused on doctrinal developments, the changes in legal principles
and structures that led to such a dramatic expansion in the reach
66 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

of international law, and the transformation in the relationship be-

tween the state and the individual that resulted.
What interests me is the contrast between two approaches,
which I will crudely call the legal, doctrinal approach on one hand
and, on the other, the historical approach adopted by Moyn (who
also studied law but who writes here more in the mode of the his-
torian).6 How does each trace the evolution of international hu-
man rights law and the character of its distinctiveness? My interest
in how two different disciplinary sensibilities approach the same
issues is in part piqued because we are now at a time when a prom-
ising confluence is taking place as history, international law, po-
litical theory, and philosophy are engaged in an interdisciplinary
dialogue around broad issues such as global justice, international
governance, cosmopolitanism, imperialism, and human rights. My
further interest lies, however, in understanding Moyns approach
to doctrine and the politics of doctrine, the way in which cer-
tain doctrines are articulated and contested and established. What
are the roles that doctrinal developments play in Moyns history?
What does this suggest about the emergence of human rights law
and about development in human rights law in general?
What, then, is distinctive about modern human rights? What
is it that previous scholars writing histories of international law
have failed to recognize?7 Moyn argues that these scholars adopt
a teleological approach, seeing earlier political projects as forerun-
ners to contemporary human rights law.8 His main argument is
that these earlier projects were very different from the modern hu-
man rights project. Thus, the natural rights claims that inspired
the French and American Revolutions were intent on creating the
nation-state rather than outlining a set of principles designed to
limit the power of the state. Similarly, the nationalist claims of
third-world states striving to achieve decolonization in the period
after World War II found legal expression in the claim to a right
to self-determination. This rights claim, however, was simply an-
other expression of the nationalist project. It was not a claim to
the effect that the individual had rights against the state that were
individually protected.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which
contained a comprehensive set of rights owed by all states to all
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 67

individuals, is hailed by many as the beginning of the modern hu-

man rights system.9 Both historians and international law schol-
ars focus on this document. Moyn, however, diminishes its signifi-
cance, pointing out that the rights articulated in the udhr were
unenforceable (in other words, that it was merely a declaration)
and, furthermore, that human rights advocates and the interna-
tional lawyers who were most engaged with this initiative were
bitterly disillusioned with its outcome. Moyn is illuminating in
pointing to the disappointment felt by one such lawyer, an early
and dedicated champion to the cause of human rights, Sir Hersch
Lauterpacht (LU, 184). The udhr, Moyn argues, had little impact
on international law or on the conduct of world affairs, even as an
ideal. Larger historical forces doomed it to irrelevance in its time
(LU, 46). Sovereignty continued to be the key founding concept of
the international system.10 Legal scholars like Henkin agree that
the udhr was a giant step but also only a step in the project
to internationalize human rights; but it is surely significant that
while some argued that it should outline a common standard of
achievement, the view prevailed that it would lead to the formula-
tion of legally binding norms (AR, 19).
The Genocide Convention, initially approved by a General As-
sembly Resolution in 1948, in contrast to the udhr of the same
year, did embody binding legal obligations and would come into
force in 1951. Most international lawyers regard the Genocide
Convention as crucial to the development of human rights law
precisely because it imposed restrictions on what a sovereign state
could do to its own people. But here, Moyn argues, lawyers at the
time saw these two projects as quite distinct, rather than inspiring
each other, precisely because of their shared idealsthat a state is
not supreme and must protect its people.11 Interestingly, Rapha-
el Lemkin himself (who coined the term genocide and deserves
more than the single passing reference made to him here) saw no
connection between genocide and human rights (LU, 82). Accord-
ing to him, the Genocide Convention was even more marginal
and peripheral in the public imagination that the Universal Decla-
ration, passed the day after (LU, 82). One wonders here, however,
to whose imagination he refers.
68 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

The contrast between Moyns approach and that taken by in-

ternational law scholars is further evident in their differing inter-
pretations of the human rights campaign waged against apartheid
South Africa from the 1950s until the end of apartheid. Claims for
the human rights of South Africans were made in a number of dif-
ferent ways and engaged the major organs of the unthe General
Assembly, the Security Council, and even, in a complex litigation
maneuver that involved critiquing South Africas policies by focus-
ing on South Africas management of South-West Africa, in the
International Court of Justice. Moreover, the campaign played a
role in the creation of the Convention on Racial Discrimination
that was drafted in 1965 and came into operation in 1969. As
early as 1952 in General Assembly Resolution 616b, for instance,
the assembly urged respect for human rights and fundamental
freedoms for all, without distinction to race, sex, language or re-
ligion and proceeded to assert that any member state practicing
discrimination was in violation of Article 56 of the charter (which
specifies that member states pledged to further the purposes of the
United Nations, as enunciated in Article 55 and which included
the promotion of fundamental human rights). South Africa op-
posed the un actions, arguing that they violated Article 2(7) of the
charter, which stipulates that the United Nations cannot interfere
in matters that are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of
the state. Crucially, this argument made was repudiated by the
assemblyitself led, somewhat ironically, by the developing states.
The affirmation that human rights principles prevail over Article
2(7) is a very important development from both a legal and a po-
litical point of view.12
But Moyn, who has clearly studied the South African case close-
ly, argues that the anti-apartheid campaign and its invocation of
human rights should be seen as part of the project of decoloniza-
tion and the creation of the state rather than human rights.13
Moyns argument is persuasive at one level; and yet, from a doctri-
nal point of view, can we accept this characterization as decisive?
According to whose perspectives and priorities are we to see such
events? All this might suggest, then, the difference between a his-
torians and a legal scholars approach to the same materials. Yet
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 69

this difference between doctrine and the particular social and po-
litical forces that created and gave effect to the doctrine can be too
emphatic and distorting at times. As mentioned, earlier in his book
Moyn makes much of the fact that the udhr was unenforceable,
arguing that this prevented it from having a significant impact on
international affairs or generating much enthusiasm among inter-
national lawyers. By 1966, however, many of the provisions of the
udhr had been transformed into two binding treaties: the Inter-
national Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (iccpr) and the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
(icescr). The rights contained in these two documents are expan-
sive, ranging from the right to speech and fair trial, the right to
life, to the right to good and the right to education. Moyn men-
tions almost as an aside that the finalization of the human rights
covenants finally occurred in 1966, thanks to the transformative
role of the new states (LU, 100). Indeed, new mechanisms were
developed to protect human rights, such as the 1503 procedure
that enabled the un to consider cases of gross human rights vi-
olations.14 Moyn acknowledges this but then, characteristically,
argues that these developments, which suggest that human rights
had already become significant in international affairs, were used
to promote the cause of anticolonialism and thus still prioritized
the triumph of sovereigntylinked to subaltern internationalism,
and thus abrogable only in an antiracist cause (LU, 100). Moyn
focuses here on the fact that each of the covenants begins by assert-
ing the right to self-determination.
Now, it is certainly the case that both the iccpr and the icescr
affirm, in their very first articles, the right to self-determination
the right asserted by colonized peoples in their efforts to win inde-
pendence. But to use that fact to then characterize the entire treaty
as being about nation-building is to drastically reduce a very elabo-
rate treaty that contains more than fifty articles and articulates a
long and detailed list of individual rights: the right to life, to free
speech, to a free and fair trial, to political participation, to be free
of torture and discrimination, to liberty and security of the person.
Further, it imposes reporting requirements on signatory states and
sets up a monitoring system. Many decades later, it remains one of
70 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

the most important of the international human rights instruments

and has generated, through its activities and the reports of the Hu-
man Rights Committee that administers it, a rich jurisprudence.
Thus, to say that the extraordinary framework of rights created
by the two covenants was about anticolonialism seems extremely
reductive when considering the fact that the un, in the midst of
great controversies about the meaning of rights and what should
count as rights (a highly problematic issue at the height of the Cold
War and decolonization), was able to create two treaties that are
still the foundation of human rights law. It is very hard to see how
the explosion of human rights (Moyn uses this word and its
variants several times) in the 1970s, even if we accept Moyns ver-
sions of it, could not have occurred without that framework being
in place. Importantly, the convention included Additional Protocol
One, which enabled individuals in states that had acceded to the
protocol to petition international human rights mechanisms cre-
ated in the treaty. Moyn places a great deal of emphasis on the
Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the human rights initiatives it in-
spired as an important event in the emergence of human rights.
Conceptually and doctrinally, I would argue, Helsinki added little
to the essential framework created by the 1966 treaties. Further,
and somewhat ironically, given the previous emphasis on enforce-
ment as a test for human rights norms, the Helsinki Accords did
not embody any binding legal obligations. The iccpr and the ic-
escr were signed in 1966 and came into existence in 1976a year
before the crucial date of 1977 that is central to Moyns argument.
But the issue is not simply what happened when. For me, the
larger point is that the states themselves consented, in however
problematic and attenuated a form, to such a range of rights that
impinged on their sovereignty. This is what signals a revolution
in international affairs. It is surely relevant, even in terms of the
emphasis on the Helsinki Accords, that, as Moyn puts it, The
Soviet Union, further, had ratified the international un covenants
around human rights in 1973 (LU, 150).15 It is a regular technique
of Moyns to acknowledge important events that might challenge
his thesis and yet elide their significance for his argument. This
is of course an ongoing revolution: not all states have signed the
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 71

iccpr, compliance and enforcement issues remain highly problem-

atic, tensions between sovereignty and human rights endure and
emerge in new formsthe most recent being, thanks to the war on
terror, the tensions between security and human rights. How
this revolution occurred, and the politics of this process, is not an
issue of much interest to Moyn, but it is surely important to and
connected with, the emergence of human rights that he chronicles.
Moyn has an impressive ability to present complex histories and
events in succinct and insightful ways. His book is equally strik-
ing for the range of issues it covers and for its adroit handling of
potentially challenging counterarguments. However, in trying to
demonstrate the distinctiveness of particular models, he may assert
these disjunctures too emphatically; the same event could have nu-
merous meanings and significances. We may read the South Afri-
can case as all about the continuity of third-world preoccupations,
but we may also read it as a crucial step in the development of
the jurisprudence of human rights. It is not always clear which of
these readings has more significance, which actors are privileged,
or what time scale we should consider in making these judgments.
After all, we can see continuities between South Africa and the lat-
er Helsinki process and its repudiation of classic ideas of sovereign-
ty and domestic jurisdiction. It is important to identify novelty,
that moment when some new doctrine, some new politics, comes
into the world; but complex interconnections and continuities also
existed, and it is important to acknowledge and trace them.16
Much of the interest of Moyns history of human rights lies in its
emphasis on the way in which human rights inspired social activ-
ists: he focuses on how rights inspire a social movement and not
simply institutions (LU, 8). It is the moment when rights percolate
in public and around the world that they acquire the distinctive
form that Moyn is so anxious to explicate and whose genealogy he
seeks to provide (LU, 44). His interest lies, not in human rights as
legal doctrine, but as a powerful transnational ideal and move-
ment (LU, 7). Consequently, he explores how human rights ac-
quired literally millennial appeal and came to define peoples
hopes for the future as the foundation of an international move-
ment and utopia of international law (LU, 7). He is interested,
72 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

then, in how human rights came into the larger world and became
such a dominant feature of public consciousness and activist think-
ing about global affairs and justice. This is a feature of interna-
tional human rights law that is undoubtedly extremely important,
and Moyns contribution to our understanding of it makes this an
especially valuable book. This approach, then, is intimately con-
nected with the second major argument Moyn makes, that human
rights emerged as the last utopia because of the exhaustion of all
other visions of political possibility. Moyn summarizes this argu-
ment in his introduction:

But far from being the sole idealism that has inspired faith and ac-
tivism in the course of human events, human rights emerged his-
torically as the last utopiaone that became powerful and promi-
nent because other visions imploded. In the realm of thinking, as
in that of social action, human rights are best understood as sur-
vivors: the god that did not fail while other ideologies did. If they
avoided failure, it was most of all because they were widely under-
stood as a moral alternative to bankrupt political agendas. (LU, 5)

Moyn repeats this central argument throughout the book. Thus

on page 170 he again asserts: It was in the atmosphere of the crisis
of utopias old and new that human rights broke through. Moyns
vision of human rights derives its origins very much from the poli-
tics of the Cold War and the Helsinki process and Jimmy Carters
embrace of rights. It was in the exhaustion of Cold War politics,
as Moyn sees it, that this singular vision of human rights, signal-
ing a move from politics to morality, emerged (LU, 171). It was
in these circumstances that human rights groups such as Amnesty
International, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, achieved
prominence and seized on human rights as a vision of global order.
The Third World, which earlier in the book had featured promi-
nently in his discussion of the relationship between human rights
and self-determination, has by now receded from viewalthough
Latin America still features in a more subdued form.
My disquiet here arises from the fact that the vast majority of
governments and people in the 1970s were preoccupied in their
struggle for a very different utopia, the utopia of development.
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 73

This was the project, I suspect, that generated a different set of

politics and preoccupied third-world economists, diplomats, law-
yers, and scholars, who in their different ways sought to achieve
the utopia of development, which can be translated in more simple
terms to the yearning of the peoples of those countries for a bet-
ter standard of living, basic necessities, sufficient food. The Third
World sought to do this by creating a New International Economic
Order (nieo). The nieo is only referenced in the index of Moyns
book. Moyn rightly points out that the Third Worlds energies
shifted from decolonization and self-determination to the creation
of a New International Economic Order and that this agenda pro-
foundly affected the activities of the un Commission on Human
Rights (LU, 117). Here he is interested in tracing the history of de-
colonization in order to distinguish the use of rights in that context
from the distinctive vision of individual rights he seeks to explicate.
However, he does not dwell on the possible significance of the nieo
for the claims he makes about the last utopia.
This seems somewhat puzzling given that it was precisely in the
1970s that third-world efforts to create the nieo were being ad-
vanced, in their most ambitious and hopeful form, in the un. In
1974 the Third World authored a Declaration for a New Inter-
national Economic Order; this basic declaration was followed by
a far more detailed and comprehensive resolution, the Charter of
Economic Rights and Duties of States. The campaign for a nieo
was sustained at a number of levels throughout the 1970s. The
classic international law work on the subject, Towards a New In-
ternational Economic Order, by the distinguished Algerian jurist
Mohammed Bedjaoui, was translated and published in English in
1979, and an enormous literature on the subject was produced
during this same period.
The nieo sought broadly to change economic relations and
structures relating to trade, investment, and commodity prices. The
principle of Permanent Sovereignty Over Natural Resources,
which had been enunciated far earlier in a series of resolutions,
most particularly in the early 1960s, was revised to emphasize the
rights of developing countries, and it was included in a more em-
phatic form in the 1974 resolutions. Human rights, then, was the
74 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

last utopia for a select group of people, largely based in the West,
whose thinking and actions Moyn focuses on because it led to the
vision of human rights that he articulates. To be fair to Moyn, he
states in the book that what he is interested in is the perception
of those who created this new vision, the activists, scholars, and,
sometimes, statesmen in the West and their counterparts in Eastern
Europe. However, he often uses broad global and universal terms,
and he writes long passages where he does not indicate whose per-
spective he is focusing on, thus sometimes giving the impression
that somehow this group is the world. How this particular vi-
sion of utopia became a global phenomenon is one of the key ques-
tions raised by the book, which focuses more on the distinctiveness
of this particular vision.
Viewed more broadly, then, for many people human rights was
not so much the last utopia at the time it emerged but an alter-
native utopia. Indeed, for many minorities and indigenous people,
the utopia they sought, and continue to seek, is the old utopia of
self-determination, recognition of nationhood, and sovereignty.17
The authors of this vision of human rights may have presented it
as both antipolitical and as the last utopia, but clearly, this vi-
sion is open to contestation. It may even be viewed not so much a
last utopia but as a counter-utopia. Whereas the Third World
sought to further the cause of global equity and, more ambitiously,
global justice by changing the character of international relations
and global economic structures (seeing these as being a cause for
immiseration and enduring poverty), human rights, particularly
having come to seem like the last utopia standing in world af-
fairs (again, to whom?), suggested that the cause of injustice was
purely endogenous (LU, 218). Justice could be achieved by demand-
ing that states comply with human rights. As such, no need existed
to change international economic structures. I am not suggesting
that this was intended by the promoters of human rights. But hu-
man rights law could be used in this way, and has been used in
this way. It is surely not a coincidence that human rights, from its
beginnings in the 1970s, flourished and expanded in the follow-
ing decades, the same decades that saw the relentless promotion
of neoliberal policies by the international financial institutions in
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 75

developing countries (well before the 1990s) and the intensification

of globalization following the end of the Cold War.
The nieo recognized the importance of international structures
and sought to reverse them; not only did the initiative fail, but
these international structures, ironically, were revised in precisely
the opposite direction from that sought by the nieo. By the early
1980s the nieo initiative had proven to be largely a failure. Rath-
er than reconfiguring the economic system to enable developing
countries to participate fairly within it, the logic of that system was
enhanced. The structural adjustment policies of the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank expanded in depth and reach,
with often devastating social consequences for the people living in
developing countries, many of which become heavily indebted as
a result.
The Third Worlds attempt to use the new vocabulary of human
rights to promote their own utopia was evident in their efforts to
establish a Right to Development through a General Assembly
Resolution in 1986. Moyn discusses the efforts of the distinguished
Senegalese jurist Keba Mbaye to link the third-world vision of de-
velopment with human rights (LU, 224). The idea was to assert
once more the principle that rich states owed duties to people liv-
ing in poor states, this time in the vocabulary of the now ascendant
language of human rights. The attempt has largely failed; it has
proved difficult to identify what the right requires, and developed
states are adamant in their refusal to recognize such a right. Moyn
discusses this unsuccessful attempt to link development to human
rights as demonstrating what he sees as the unfortunate extension
of rights, from their 1977 origins, to deal with all issues of social
and global justice. At the jurisprudential level, classic and conser-
vative ideas of rights (that they are held by individuals) were de-
ployed against a right to development that was collective and that
called for global redistribution of wealth. This failure in itself sug-
gests how the language of rights is constructed in a way that is in-
adequate for purposes of bringing any claims for global redistribu-
tion; they are two different, if not antagonistic, projects.18 But we
should also note that the utopia of development was not peculiar
to the Third World. It could be argued that the idea of achieving a
76 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

decent standard of living, of meeting basic needs, was the utopia

sought by all people all around the world, and that both capitalism
and communism promised to provide this.
The nieo failed; but the utopian19 dream of development sur-
vives and continues to animate people throughout the world, not
to mention governments and international institutions.20 Once this
is understood, we might appreciate one major aspect of human
rights law: its complex and ongoing relationship with develop-
ment.21 On the one hand, human rights scholars and activists have
attempted to advance development through human rights; on the
other, governments have made it clear that development takes pre-
cedence over human rights (if those rights mean civil and politi-
cal rights) and, indeed, that it is through development that human
rights, basic social and economic needs, are fulfilled. These latter
claims are in essence the basis of the Asian human rights debate.22
In many developing countries the claim of promoting develop-
ment has been used to justify dictatorship, and this is one of the
principal reasons why human rights became important to the peo-
ples of those countries. We can also understand the conservative
potential of rights and their possible use to further neoliberalism,
as in the claims for good governance and the use of the language
of rights by institutions such as the World Bank, in the 1990s, to
both justify their failures and further the scope of their activities.23
This is surely an important issue to focus on if we are, as Moyn
says, intent on understanding the future of human rights. The com-
petition between these two visions of utopiahuman rights and
developmentis an important feature of the contemporary world.
The utopia of development has acquired a peculiar and danger-
ous power because it is often viewed, like utopian human rights,
as above or beyond politics, as something to be achieved through
technocratic management and expert rule.24
The success of human rights in 1977, Moyn argues, lay in its
minimalism, its focus on what might be termed fundamental
rights. This minimalism was crucial to the claim of human rights
to be antipolitics (to use Moyns term) and to be utopian. Once
human rights emerged and became the powerful discourse that
Henkin speaks of, it was compelled to expand its application to all
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 77

the issues of suffering humanity, which led to Philip Alstons fa-

mous plea for a system of human rights quality control.25 Moyn
closes his book with a reflection on the costs and benefits of this
expansion, a prominent feature of modern international relations.
Most recently, human rights scholars, activists, and organizations
have committed their energies to two ambitious projects: interna-
tional criminal law and the concept of a Responsibility to Pro-
tect.26 These projects are minimalist at least in the sense that
each covers only the most egregious types of violations.27 But they
have attracted extraordinary attention and generated very ambi-
tious hopes in terms of the role they can play in furthering the cause
of international justice. The controversies surrounding them indi-
cate that no initiative, even if devised to prevent the worst atroci-
ties, is free of dispute. At the same time, the old political project
of nationhood continues to be compelling to minority groups and
indigenous peoples, for whom the language of self-determination is
still very significant. And furthermore, there is the initiative to hold
non-state actors such as multinational corporations responsible for
human rights violations. Human rights, then, may be, as Moyn
suggests, the victim of its own success. And yet, it seems unaccept-
able to claim a particular model of rights to be authoritative or to
deny various oppressed populations recourse to this vocabulary as
they pursue their own visions of utopia. Perhaps we need a better
framework to see how novelty develops, how new understandings
of human rights emerge and become so popular and powerful as
different entities take on the task of being quite explicit norm en-
trepreneurs. These are some of the questions prompted by Moyns
book, which presents its case with erudition and flair. Whatever the
qualifications one makes, his argument is persuasive and original
and compels a rethinking of materials and issues once thought to
be familiar and settled.

Notes

1. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cam-

bridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 9. Hereafter cited as LU.
2. Moyn presents his vision of human rights in various registers. Some-
times he suggests the following formula, almost as a definitive and
78 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

authoritative model: the drama of human rights, then, is that they

emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere (LU, 3). At other
times he presents his model of rights as just one model, a modern,
distinctive model of rights.
3. The World Banks Articles of Association suggest that the Bank
should not take human rights issues into account when deciding
whether to provide loans to a particular country.
4. Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), xvii. Hereafter cited as AR.
5. Henry Steiner, The Youth of Rights, Harvard Law Review 104
(199091): 917. Steiners article is a review of Henkins The Age of
Rights.
6. There are, of course, many historical (and legal) approaches. Here I
focus on what I see as Moyns historical approach.
7. Moyn does not always identify the historians whose models he is
contesting, but in his bibliographical essay he mentions the works of
Mary Anne Glendon, Lynn Hunt, and Elizabeth Borgwardt.
8. I make no comment here about the accuracy of these characteriza-
tions, which are no doubt open to discussion.
9. Thus Henkin: The contemporary idea of human rights was formu-
lated and given content during the Second World War and its after-
math (AR, 1).
10. Never at any point were they primarily understood as breaking fun-
damentally with the world of states that the United Nations brought
together (LU, 45). The continuing primacy of sovereignty, even in
this era of globalization, is something many scholars continue to as-
sert. See Jose Alvarez, State Sovereignty Is Not Withering Away:
A Few Lessons for the Future, in Realizing Utopia, ed. Antonio
Cassese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2638.
11. Even viewed from a doctrinal perspective, Moyn makes a very per-
ceptive point. The Genocide Convention does not make the individ-
ual person as such the subject of rights. It is based on the idea of
individuals belonging to a group that might be subject to genocide.
12. The precedent is an important one, even though it has only been used
selectively over the years. See Richard Schifter, Human Rights at the
United Nations: The South Africa Precedent, American University
Journal of International Law and Policy 8 nos. 23 (Winter 1992/
Spring 1993): 36172.
13. Moyn asserts that by 1976, with the Soweto uprising, the move-
ment against apartheid was evolving into a human rights struggle like
others elsewhere (LU, 173).
 Anghie: Human Rights, Development, and the Third World 79

14. It is certainly true that the 1503 procedure, promoted by many third-
world states, was used to further the cause of anti-racism and oppose
racial discrimination, both causes of which were connected with an-
ticolonialism. However, it was used for a much wider range of politi-
cal projects and purposes, including human rights abuses in Burma,
Indonesia, Malawi, Uruguay, and Greece. See M. E. Tardu, United
Nations Responses to Gross Violations of Human Rights: The 1503
Procedures, Santa Clara Law Review 20, no. 3 (1980): 559601.
15. The United States, by contrast, ratified the iccpr in 1992, and did so
with numerous reservations and understandings as to what the it
understood the terms of the treaty to mean.
16. I have focused here on a few examples, but I could make variations of
these arguments in relation to the emergence of the rights of refugees
and the 1951 un convention on refugee rights.
17. Joshua Castellino and Jeremie Gilbert, Self-Determination, Minori-
ties and Human Rights, Macquarie Law Journal 8 (2008): 15178;
Karen Engle, The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Strategy: Rights,
Culture, Strategy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
18. Moyn indirectly asserts as much in pointing out how different the
idea of a right to development is from the model of rights he expli-
cates (LU, 22425).
19. Utopian is understood here in the classic sense that it is highly
questionable whether it can ever be made a reality.
20. See Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonizing International Law: Development,
Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
21. See, for example, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Counter-hegemonic In-
ternational Law: Rethinking Human Rights and Development as a
Third World Strategy, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 5 (2006):
76783.
22. See Jeanne Woods and Hope Lewis, eds., Human Rights and the
Global Marketplace: Economic, Social and Cultural Dimensions
(Ardsley ny: Transnational Publishers, 2005).
23. Antony Anghie, Time Present and Time Past: Globalization, Inter-
national Financial Institutions and the Third World, New York Uni-
versity Journal of International Law and Policy 32, no. 2 (Winter
2000): 24390.
24. David Kennedy, Challenging Expert Rule: The Politics of Global
Governance, Sydney Law Review 27 (2005): 528.
80 qui parle fall/winter 2013 vol. 22, no. 1

25. Philip Alston, Conjuring Up New Human Rights: A Proposal for

Quality Control, American Journal of International Law 78, no. 3
(Summer 1984): 60721.
26. Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Pro-
tect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
27. For instance, in the case of Responsibility to Protect, the so-called
r2p crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes
against humanity.
Contributors

megan alvarado saggese is a graduate student in rhetoric at

the University of California, Berkeley.

antony anghie is Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law in the

S. J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. His re-
search interests include public and private international law; hu-
man rights; globalization, development issues, and international
law; terrorism and the use of force; international business transac-
tions and international economic law; colonialism and the history
of public international law; and third-world approaches to inter-
national law. His books include Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the
Limits of International Law (2005), The Third World and Interna-
tional Legal Order, coedited with Bhupinder Chimni, Karin Mick-
elson, and Obiora Okafor (2003), and Legal Visions of the 21st
Century: Essays in Honour of Judge Christopher Weeramantry,
coedited with Garry Sturgess (1998).

seyla benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Sci-

ence and Philosophy at Yale University. She is a Guggenheim fel-
lowship recipient and winner of the Ernst Bloch and Leopold Lu-
cas awards. Her latest publication is Dignity in Adversity: Human
Rights in Troubled Times (2011).

pheng cheah is professor of rhetoric at the University of Califor-

nia, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1999. He has published
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permission.