The Human Rights Project and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Rights

This essay argues for a critical reconsideration of cosmopolitan human rights and of the post-Cold War Human Rights Project. It begins by contextualizing cosmopolitan rights in their historical and ideological context, showing that they are deeply complicit in a broader regime of neoliberal global governance, helping to justify and to depoliticize new modalities of coercive conditionality that characterize that regime. It shows how specific features of cosmopolitan rights contribute directly to this form of indirect rule and opines that present indifference or hostility toward human rights can and should be understood in part as a product of this complicity and of the wider failures of neoliberal global governance. The essay concludes with some reflections on the study of backlash against human rights amidst the real threat of rising ethno-nationalism and fascistic politics.