"We live throughout the endtimes of the civilizing undertaking. The ineffectual foreign legal courtroom and its disastrous first prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, in addition to the failure in Syria of the accountability to guard are the most recent items of proof now not of temporary misfortunes yet of deadly structural defects in foreign humanism. if it is the rise in lethal assaults on relief employees, the torture and 'disappearing' of al-Qaeda suspects through American officers, the flouting of overseas legislations through states reminiscent of Sri Lanka and Sudan, or the shambles of the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Phnom Penh, the possibility of 1 global lower than secular human rights legislation is receding. What looked like a sunrise is actually a sundown. the rules of common liberal norms and worldwide governance are crumbling."—from The Endtimes of Human Rights

In a booklet that's without delay passionate and provocative, Stephen Hopgood argues, opposed to the normal knowledge, that the assumption of common human rights has develop into not just unwell tailored to present realities but additionally overambitious and unresponsive. A shift within the international stability of energy clear of the U.S. extra undermines the principles on which the worldwide human rights regime relies. American decline exposes the contradictions, hypocrisies and weaknesses at the back of the try to implement this regime around the globe and opens the way in which for resurgent spiritual and sovereign actors to problem human rights.

Historically, Hopgood writes, common humanist norms encouraged a feeling of secular religiosity one of the new center periods of a speedily modernizing Europe. Human rights have been the fabricated from a selected worldview (Western eu and Christian) and particular ancient moments (humanitarianism within the 19th century, the aftermath of the Holocaust). They have been an antidote to a troubling contradiction—the coexistence of a trust in development with scary violence and turning out to be inequality. The obsolescence of that founding objective within the glossy globalized global has, Hopgood asserts, reworked the associations created to accomplish it, resembling the overseas Committee of the pink pass and lately the overseas legal court docket, into self-perpetuating buildings of intermittent energy and authority that masks their loss of democratic legitimacy and systematic ineffectiveness. At their most sensible, they supply reduction in impressive occasions of serious misery; in a different way they're serving up a mix of fake wish and unaccountability sustained via “human rights” as an international brand.

The Endtimes of Human Rights is bound to be debatable. Hopgood makes a plea for a brand new figuring out of the place wish lies for human rights, a plea that mourns the promise yet rejects the truth of universalism in prefer of a much less predictable come across with the varied realities of today’s multipolar world.