Joseph Slaugther publishes “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World.”

March 7, 2019 – Topics of Interest

“Recent histories of human rights identify the 1970s as the ‘breakthrough’ period when they gained traction globally.  However, most of the new historiographers adopt a restricted Americo-Eurocentric perspective that disregards events and peoples in the Global South as makers of human rights history.  From that perspective, the Western ‘rediscovery’ of human rights in the 1970s looks more like a hijacking, part of a larger ‘rollback’ of Third World agendas to decolonize and reshape the international order.”Slaughter has published an expansive critique of the recent revisionist histories of human rights in the journal Human Rights Quarterly: “Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World.”