Human Rights at a Crossroads: Political Uses of Universalism in Times of Contestation

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the human rights framework has come to occupy a central place in systems of governance at the international level. Yet its legitimacy has increasingly been challenged, notably by national executives and political movements that contest it either to advance illiberal agendas or to question both its universalist claims and the democratic legitimacy of the ways in which it is promoted.
Against this backdrop, this panel seeks to examine how these challenges to human rights reshape the circulation of the discourses, mechanisms, and practices that invoke them. In doing so, it invites participants to move beyond questions of the effectiveness of human rights alone and instead explore the struggles over who has the authority to define, interpret, prioritise, and control their uses.
Depending on the context, these discourses, mechanisms, and practices may – or may not – be accompanied by attempts to dismantle legal frameworks, institutions, and organisations dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights. What do these different configurations mean for state and non-state actors engaged in advancing human rights? To what political processes are the principles associated with the rule of law and liberal democracy, which accompany the circulation of human rights, being subjected – rejection, contestation, adaptation, selective appropriation, or instrumentalisation?
The contributions to this panel offer an interdisciplinary reflection on the dynamics of human rights circulation in contexts marked by anti-rights rhetoric and/or by critiques of human rights’ claim to universality and the Western-centrism associated with it. They prioritise empirically grounded analyses drawing on critical socio-political approaches. In this way, the panel aims to move beyond the simple diagnosis of a “crisis” of human rights in order to examine the struggles over authority, the power relations, and the normative reconfigurations that unfold around their circulation.