Although East—West and North—South relations take up a good part of the debate about human rights in contemporary world politics, they do not exhaust it. The object of this chapter is to come to a view about the place of human rights in world society as a whole. The approach, in the first place, will be institutional. What regimes have been established in regard to human rights at the global and at the regional levels? And what is the contribution of non-governmental organizations in the field of human rights? Then, in the light of this discussion, the next question to be asked will be about the universal values implicit in the expression ‘human rights’. What is the evidence that there is the kind of convergence in regard to values in world society as a whole that we tried out in Chapter 3 as a possible sociological route to universal human rights? Might it not be that our regimes cut across rather than reinforce each other?

Finally, we shall need to ask — as a preface to the last section of the book, which looks at what is to be done about human rights in international relations — how differences, in regard both to values and to their implementation, are to be viewed.