Human rights underwent a widespread revolution internationally over the course of the twentieth century. The most striking change is the fact that it is no longer acceptable for a government to make sovereignty claims in defense of egregious rights abuses. The legitimacy of a broad range of rights of individuals vis-à-vis their own government stands in contrast to a long-standing presumption of internal sovereignty: the right of each state to determine its own domestic social, legal, and political arrangements free from outside interference. And yet, the construction of a new approach has taken place largely at governments' own hands. It has taken place partially through the development of international legal institutions to which governments themselves have, often in quite explicit terms, consented.

How and why the turn toward the international legalization of human rights has taken place, and what this means for crucial aspects of the human condition, is at the core of this study. From the 1950s to the new millennium, governments have committed themselves to a set of explicit legal obligations that run counter to the old claim of state sovereignty when it comes to protecting the basic rights of individual human beings. There was nothing inevitable about this turn of normative and legal events. Indeed, the idea that sovereign governments are not accountable to outsiders for their domestic policies had been presumed for centuries.