Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is a contemporary historian whose recent work focuses on human rights. He teaches at Berkeley, California, and between November and December he was a visiting guest at the Ciampi Institute in Florence.

Over the past two years, the world has witnessed an explicit scaling back of the use of human rights in international politics. Western governments increasingly disregard the human rights records of regimes, and the stark contrast in Europe’s responses to the Ukrainian conflict and to Gaza has made this attitude unmistakably clear to public opinion. This was not always the case. With all its ambiguities, in the decades immediately following the end of the Cold War, human rights were presented as the principle that guided and legitimized political decisions, sanctions, and wars. What has changed, and how has the way human rights are conceived changed in contemporary history, in the West and elsewhere, and across different phases of a history that began with the Atlantic Revolutions more than two centuries ago? Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is a contemporary historian whose recent work focuses on human rights. He teaches at Berkeley, California, and between November and December he was a guest of the Ciampi Institute in Florence. We spoke with him about his field of research.

“What we are witnessing is the retreat of human rights as a topic of political debate. They are no longer invoked in the West; indeed, one might say they are ignored or relegated to the margins. Yet the issue of human rights resurfaces here and there, at particular moments and around different questions and concerns. In short, the idea is clearly in crisis compared to the 1990s, but it has not disappeared.”

Ukraine, Gaza, forgotten wars, international law trampled underfoot, the rule of law under attack. Has the evolution of human rights come to an end? Is this why it has become a subject for historians?

Yes. The idea of approaching certain phenomena from a historian’s perspective arises when we observe things— in this case, a concept— and realize that they have ceased to be self-evident and hegemonic. Contemporary reality seems to tell us quite clearly that we are looking in the rear-view mirror at the era of human rights. My starting point is the observation that, in the last ten to fifteen years, a historiography of human rights emerged, similarly to “global history.” Before then, these historical fields did not exist. Human rights, in other words, became an object of study for historians only recently. Historians, of course, always arrive last: political scientists, sociologists, and legal scholars work on these issues–human rights and globalization—since the end of the Cold War. But once something is no longer what Michel Foucault called an episteme—a system of rules that structures knowledge and defines which discourses are accepted within a sociopolitical system—once it is no longer taken for granted, it becomes an object of historical inquiry. This is where my interest originates. I believe we have reached the point at which it is possible to historicize the enthusiasm for human rights that characterized the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Perhaps the backlash is also due to the decline of the idea of the West as the bearer of a civilizing mission after the disaster of the Second Gulf War and to the often hypocritical use of the concept. One need only think of the immense disparity between Western discourse on Ukraine and on Gaza: in one case, democracy and rights must prevail; in the other, glaring violations of international law are ignored. Today, a leader who speaks of human rights risks convincing no one, whereas thirty-five years ago the concept itself carried persuasive power. If the idea has not disappeared, the question is: where and how does it endure?

The “promise” of the continuous expansion of human rights reappears at various moments in history, in different forms and with different language. But the concept of individual human rights becomes central in global politics only after the end of the Cold War. In the 1970s and 1980s, “human rights” coexisted and overlapped with other moral and political idioms such as “solidarity,” and included competing notions of rights that were still deeply indebted to the legacies of socialism and anti-colonialism, as in the transnational movement against apartheid. It was only after the end of the Cold War that “human rights” emerged as the primary explanatory framework for understanding what had just occurred: the end of Soviet-style Communism and the breakdown of a bipolar world order post-1990.

This is very different from post-1945. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the idea formed part of the promise of an international order that would guarantee peace and make the recurrence of devastating conflicts such as the two world wars impossible. This idea was, in some way, implicit in all the founding documents of the United Nations drafted over the span of a few years: beginning with the UN Charter, followed by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the 1951 Geneva Convention. The attempt was to guarantee the world an international order based on rules and to make wars of aggression impossible. This was the phase in which the first “promise” of an order in which human rights carried weight emerged. Then, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, this United Nations–based “human rights internationalism”—if we wish to call it that—took on the promise of decolonization. In essence, human rights and self-determination became almost synonymous, liberation understood as the affirmation of the rights of all. Within a few years, postcolonial nations became the majority in the General Assembly and supported the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. All contained the promise of self-determination. These, in a sense, are the two pillars of the postwar and post-empire international order: self-determination and human rights.

In the 1990s we enter yet another phase and another conception of human rights, which emerged after another collapse of the world order: the end of the Cold War. Especially in the West, this involved the idea of rights as exclusively individual, detached from what were seen as failed utopias of the “age of extremes,” to use Eric Hobsbawms title for his short history of the twentieth century: socialism, but also anti-colonialism.

Human rights as a promise that does not last long…

In my view, the idealism of human rights is not the cause but the consequence of the epochal ruptures of the late twentieth century. In many respects, human rights replaced faith in a different kind of utopia, which is why the Yale historian Samuel Moyn titled his book on human rights The Last Utopia. An utopia that promised individual rights on a global scale. The cracks in the promise of this last utopia begin to appear with the belated interventions in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia or, conversely, the non-intervention in Rwanda. A turning point can be identified with the Nato-intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the very first war in the history of Nato and the first waged in the name of human rights, outside of international law. These “humanitarian” interventions paved the way for the aggressive interventionism of the United States after September 11, 2001, when the language of human rights was employed alongside the idea of exporting democracy, free markets and promoting regime change. It is in this phase that criticism of human rights grows, from both the radical right and the radical left, as well as from postcolonial legal scholars who exposed hypocrisies that had not yet dominated international politics in the 1980s and early 1990s. A kind of disillusionment and critique emerges, even within activist circles, raising questions about the actual place of human rights in the contemporary world.

What we have witnessed over the past five or ten years is what makes me reluctant to conclude that the idea has exhausted its role: much of the infrastructure for human rights, if we wish to use that term, is still standing. We have more NGOs engaged in human rights work on the ground than ever before in history; we have the international institutions and legal mechanisms created after 1945, as well as those established in the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1990s, such as the International Criminal Court. These institutions exist and continue to do their work. This form of human rights advocacy persists, and we also see growing grassroots activism that supports the return to a broader conception of human rights, including the right to housing, affordability, and health care. Today’s world is, in some respects, the most unequal we have seen since the 1920s, and these groups seek to adapt the language of human rights to establish normative standards and imagine a new promise, which includes new causes such as environmental rights.

One could say that the dominant discourse—with its share of hypocrisy and silences—has planted a seed or contributed to the language that continues to be used by those who fight for human rights, even as they recognize its cracks and contradictions.

One example is the link between human rights and revolutions. Human rights—then called the rights of man—gained political traction at the end of the eighteenth century. Why? Because in the case of the revolutions in the Americas, independence from empires had to be justified. And the only way to justify a break with imperial authority was to invoke a principle superior to monarchical power. In this case, human rights were a version of the older language of natural rights. What interests me less is retracing the long history of natural law that goes back centuries. What interests me is the question: when does this moral and legal language become politically operative? When does it become a catalyst for revolutionary change and for the creation of a new type of order? This occurred for the first time in the late eighteenth century during the American Revolution.

This link between the rights of man, or human rights, and self-determination weakens almost immediately once independence is achieved. In the U.S., it took another two centuries for African Americans to be granted full citizenship rights. But revolution is the moment in which this political language becomes operative for the first time. In subsequent wars of independence in the Americas, we see human rights mobilized precisely to achieve independence from the French, Spanish and Portuguese Empires. We also see this during the decolonization of Africa and Asia since the 1940s. Certainly, there are well-known critiques of human rights by postcolonial intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon. But if one looks at African politicians of the 1950s and 1960s, at anti-colonial organizations and their founding documents—for example, the founding document of the African National Congress—human rights and self-determination are always the first principles. They are central at the 1955 Bandung Conference, which gave rise to this union of African and Asian postcolonial nations. From there, they are transferred to the United Nations, where self-determination, in relation to human rights, itself becomes a human right in 1960. This was not the case in 1945 or 1948. Even in the 1948 Universal Declaration, self-determination does not appear, because the world was still imperial, and the document was in part written by imperial politicians.

We often speak of the 1990s as the moment when human rights, in some way, took the place of utopias. During that decade, globalization took hold and liberalization triumphed. Did these processes advance together?

I believe that human rights are an integral part of the transformations that began in the late 1970s and exploded in the 1990s and 2000s, which we also call globalization. The very concept of globalization only emerged in the 1990s. It is often forgotten that it was a new concept, intended to describe something that was happening within our own lifetimes. It was linked to another phenomenon that has itself become an object of historical study: the rise of neoliberalism. There was a kind of faith in the connection between open markets, the circulation of capital, information and people, and the evolution of human rights—and then also democracy—on a global scale. That was essentially the prevailing interpretation of what was happening in our world. It was not a promise but a perceived reality, the direction taken by humanity.

The return of faith in progress…

Indeed, there was a strong belief that we were living in a world in which some conflicts of the past are over, for example, conflicts over territory—a notion that today seems absurd, given the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the return of imperial power politics. Yet social scientists and political scientists in the late 1990s and early 2000s told us that in the era of the network society, territory would no longer be relevant. In a network society, where everyone is on the internet, with free markets, and individual human rights—why would we need territory? The centrality of human rights discourse is only one aspect of this broader story of global transformation that unfolded between the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and from which we are now emerging. This history, however, has yet to be fully researched. Historians are only just beginning to confront it and to explain why we find ourselves where we are today.

Human rights are often described as a Western cultural product. Today, we are in a phase in which different models compete. Social media are filled with young Chinese users explaining in English how their society and their model function better than liberal democracy. In the places of global power, the hypocrisy associated with human rights is glaringly visible—or not even acknowledged at all: Trump-era foreign policy tended not to use the category at all. Conversely, if we think of climate conferences, for example, it is the Global South that raises the issue of human rights. It is the powerless who protest: “We have rights. You are the polluters.” In some ways, the situation has been reversed compared to the 1990s.

There are many similar observations one can make about our time. One recent example is Nicolas Guillou, one of the judges of the International Criminal Court, a French national, who described the effects that being placed on the U.S. government’s sanctions list had on his life. It is not only that he cannot travel to the United States; he cannot use products from U.S. companies, because the sanctions cancel his accounts with Expedia, Amazon, Google, and so on. We thus find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: the idea of U.S. sanctions, which was introduced in the 1990s to punish human rights violations around the world, is now instrumentalized against a judge of the International Criminal Court who is attempting to prosecute the Israeli prime minister and his former minister of defense for war crimes. This is yet another of the reversals or inversions we are witnessing.

That said, I would still challenge your assumptions on two points. First, human rights is not a purely Western concept. The notion of human rights that prevailed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was largely—at least to the same extent—shaped by what we now call the Global South. These concepts were reinvented during decolonization and the Global Cold War.  Given the evolution of the idea, it should not surprise us that it is no longer the world powers that draw most heavily on international human rights language. As I have said, this is a language that predates the 1990s. From a different perspective, one could argue that the 1990s and early 2000s were the exception, and that today we are returning to the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when some Western governments used human rights in a highly instrumental manner while simultaneously supporting regimes that notoriously violated them, such as apartheid South Africa. This kind of hypocrisy is nothing new. If we consider this history from a broader perspective, our present may become less opaque and less impenetrable.

The use of human rights as a justification for interventions—“we bring them to you”—was a Western idea. This is why a left-wing critique of human rights emerged in the 2000s, but also a critique of human rights on the right, think of nationalists or neo-imperialists such as Aleksandr Dugin in Russia. There was, in effect, a hijacking of human rights by the West in the 1990s and 2000s that produced a backlash. Naturally, this critique also applies to the Global South: we should learn to look more closely at postcolonial states that invoke human rights at international conferences without implementing them in their domestic policies. Like human rights, hypocrisy is not a Western prerogative.

However, as I said at the beginning of our conversation, this does not mean that human rights are finished. The infrastructure remains in place. We have become more critical, more sober in our use of human rights language, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.