Giuseppe Mazzini in (and beyond) the history of human rights

Interrupting the Human Rights Expansion Narrative

“…But the vine withered as the fruit ripened. The sad fact is that historiography has not caught up with history […] (Moyn,2014b: 1–2)…”

“…In a number of iconoclastic contributions, Moyn (2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014a, 2014b, 2015) has argued convincingly that human rights’ social traction in the postwar era was highly limited, and this for three fundamental reasons. First, there was little to no consensus on what human rights were and consequently they could not have played the role assigned to them by subsequent triumphalist backstories of expansion and supersession (Borgwardt, 2007: 59; Mazower, 2009: 9; Moyn, 2010: 50; Roberts, 2015).…”

“…I want to explore, and ultimately interrupt, the insufficiently examined claim that human rights might be understood as the extension and/or supersession of citizenship rights in a global world (Brysk, 2013; Jacobson, 1996; Levy and Sznaider, 2010; Sassen, 2002; Shafir and Brysk, 2006; Soysal, 1994, 2012; Turner, 1993, 2006). Implicit in these two tropes, as I will show in detail below, is the acceptance of what have now become the taken for granted “backstories” (Moyn, 2014b: 1–2) of the emergence and development of human rights (Glendon, 2002; Ishay, 2004; Lauren, 1998): principally, that human rights are the product of a singular expansion of a postwar normative consensus amongst the world community.…”

Are Rights Out of Time? International Human Rights Law, Temporality, and Radical Social Change

“…It is only through opening up to the unknown and its uncertainties that, as Butler and Cornell assist us to see, productive democratic debate on social change can have any possibility of occurring. Engaging such in the context of international human rights law may allow us to move beyond what has been described as the apolitical future-focus of international human rights in recent decades (Moyn, 2014: 135–148). Instead, we may imagine a future in and for such rights that facilitates democratic debate on the new and the excluded, refocusing on what is political, oppositional and contestatory at the heart of rights (Douzinas, 2007: 101–110).…”

New directions in theorizing human rights

“…As with her broader discussion of narratives, Calloni focuses on the dark side of the emotions, especially the role of fear in the literary and philosophical stories that have imposed stark divisions between the domestic sphere and the public sphere, children and adults, individuals and the sovereign state, and the powerless and the powerful in Western political thought. Akin to Douzinas and Derrida, as well as the later Foucault, Calloni shows how these binary oppositions can and should be broken down such that new narratives of human rights may be constructed in a way that genuinely encompass the needs and interests of the whole of humanity, not solely the privileged and powerful among us (Golder, 2010; Moyn, 2014: 146). As Douzinas (2007) points out, human rights—as written in law, shared in society, created in culture, reasoned in philosophy, or demanded in activism—are constructed by humans but in turn construct who is (and is not) human (2007: 57).…”