An Introduction to International Relations

Introduction

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

The concept of Human rights has become one of the central political doctrines of international politics. This is a remarkable state of affairs, given that only seventy years ago the idea, while championed by some, had little or no traction on the behaviour of states with one another. The end of World War II was the key marker in the birth of the human rights movement as we know it today. Prior to that war, human rights – or ‘the rights of man’ as they were known then – had few political supporters in international relations. The doctrines of realism, or realpolitik, seemed an accurate description of international politics and stood opposed to the kinds of idealism and moralism that the idea of human rights was thought to embody. Importantly, too, the idea of universal rights had fallen on hard times in intellectual terms, being subject to various critiques which undermined its authority and persuasive power.

World War II was one of a series of tragedies that gripped the world in the twentieth century. The particularly horrific atrocities manifested by Germany through the Holocaust precipitated a radical change in the structures of international politics, and in the place that moral concerns were given within those structures. The international system underwent a crisis of legitimacy, and one component of the restoration of that legitimacy was the emergence of the modern human rights movement. Above all else, this movement sought to establish minimum standards for the behaviour of states in order for them to have legitimate standing in the international community.

These standards were expressed through, and were to be monitored and implemented by, a new organisation founded after World War II, the United Nations. Human rights were articulated in the UN Charter. In 1948, the key document of the human rights movement was promulgated by the United Nations: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.