What was the relationship between human rights and decolonization? Roland Burke and Samuel Moyn provide terrific answers in their new books Decolonization and the evolution of international human rights and the last utopia. The two volumes deserve to frame the burgeoning conversation about human rights in the twentieth century, partly because they offer provocative and original interpretations of the recent past, but mostly because their arguments sit in such fascinating opposition. When placed alongside one another, they illuminate not only the fault lines within the current historiography but also the challenges of writing about human rights as a global phenomenon in history.

Both authors are interested in whether anti-colonialism was a human rights movement. Decolonization and the evolution of international human rights says yes, and binds the post 1940s human rights story firmly to politics at the UN General Assembly. Burke’s argument is fairly straightforward: the developing world owned the human rights project from the late 1940s until the mid 1970s. Focusing mostly on public debates at the United Nations, he shows how African, Arab, and Asian diplomats appropriated the human rights idea after 1948, using it as leverage both to push European empires out of the global south and to take ownership of the General Assembly’s political agenda. Were nationalists from the developing world – individuals such as Mahmud Azmi, Bedia Afnan, and Salvador López – simply rhetorical opportunists? Perhaps, but they ‘were no more cynical in their use of human rights than the great Western icons of the early U.N. program’ (p. 5) – figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Malik, and René Cassin.

Burke moves forward from this statement, connecting 1955 Bandung to 1968 Tehran by way of 1961 New York, but Moyn lingers with the conceptual ironies of such a distinction. Like recent work by Mark Mazower and Jan Eckel – and unlike texts by Mary Ann Glendon, Paul Gordon Lauren, and Jay Winter – The last utopia views the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights sceptically, and puts precedence on the political goals of developing world sloganeering in the post-war years. Moyn pushes his thesis too far in suggesting that anti-colonialists ‘rarely invoked the phrase “human rights”’ (p. 85) – Burke’s book proves his claim inaccurate – but The last utopia’s central argument nonetheless comes through: postcolonial nationalists saw human rights through the lens of self-determination and economic development, and they envisioned the nation-state as always the agent of rights, human and other. Consequently, the individual human rights project – the one that we think of when we talk about human rights today – emerged only in the 1970s, as non-governmental groups came to terms with decolonization’s varied shortcomings. For them, human rights represented a ‘minimalist, hardy’ utopian alternative to the grand, state-centred visions that dominated global affairs during the mid twentieth century (p. 121).

Burke does not deny that his protagonists fell on hard times in the late 1960s and 1970s, nor does he dispute The last utopia’s depiction of self-determination’s relationship to the human rights idea. However, instead of orienting his interpretation around Moyn’s national/individual rights axis, he focuses on the rise and reversal of ‘universalism’ within the human rights debate. Cast as the panacea of all things imperial during the late 1950s and early 1960s, human rights grew less prominent after 1966 because (cynical, relativistic) dictators supplanted (sincere, universalist) democrats in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Glossing over the awkward place of the nation-state in this story – Catherine Boone, Frederick Cooper, and James Scott appear nowhere in Burke’s footnotes – as well as the existence and rhetorical preferences of Moyn’s non-UN activists, Decolonization and the evolution of international human rights concludes with a conceptual irony: developing world diplomats popularized and legitimized the idea of universal rights for the rest of us, but autocrats from the global south exposed such protections as limited, incomplete, and ethereal (p. 149).

At first glance, Burke and Moyn appear to be arguing past one another. The former sees the human rights project crumbling under the weight of cultural relativism during the 1970s; the latter looks at the same period and witnesses a rising movement, energized, interconnected, and stateless. In a bibliographical essay in The last utopia’s final pages, Moyn chalks up this disjuncture to methodology: while his human rights are conceptually ‘up for grabs,’ Burke’s human rights are ‘stable’ and hence able to be ‘betrayed’ by anti-colonialism (p. 316). The distinction is useful – the two historians certainly calibrate the primacy of politics and ideas differently – but only to a point. In reality, Burke and Moyn are merely looking at different people using the same terms in alternative contexts, and, if one peels away the veneer of word choice, a common two-step trajectory binds their books. For both authors, the conversation about human rights first ebbed and flowed in relation to anti-colonial nationalism through the 1960s, only to be remade thereafter by the growth of individualism and relativism – two sides of the same semantic coin – during the 1970s.

Decolonization and the evolution of international human rights and The last utopia are wonderfully provocative books. However, it is hard to escape the fact that both historians are nibbling at the rhetorical edges of what are essentially bigger stories – decolonization and globalization, respectively. Their conclusions raise as many questions as they answer. Is it possible to discuss a singular human rights narrative if the phrase’s meaning alters in context? Do rights possess meaning outside the specific political contests in which they are deployed? Where does ‘legitimacy’ come from, and how has it affected the human rights story? And, perhaps most importantly, why did the human rights conversation change over time?

Neither Decolonization and the evolution of international human rights nor The last utopia provides answers. But they do highlight the fault lines within the existing academic literature, and link the decolonization story to the rights revolution in important and novel ways. Going forward, scholars of human rights have a formidable set of challenges on their hands – and a research agenda worthy of the ambiguities, complexities, and contradictions of contemporary international society.