When his friend Max Brod asked him whether there is “hope outside this manifestation of the world we know,” Franz Kafka memorably replied that “there is hope, no end to hope—only not for us.” For centuries, some Christians had sought evidence for hope in things unseen. Kathryn Sikkink, in her naïve and noble insistence in her new book that there is proof that human rights is a durable faith, has published her own moving credo, calling for a hunt for outrageous heresy along the way. Unfortunately, it comes with very bad timing, at a moment of historic crisis for human rights movements that everyone must now acknowledge. We may need more faith than human rights projects ever justified.

The crisis is not due to a motley crew of academic skeptics who reject the fideism of the last generations. It is therefore a pity that, driven by excessive concern with them, Sikkink is diverted from more important tasks. Indeed, to locate her work’s naivete and nobility, sympathetic readers of Sikkink’s latest book must look beyond her distortion and homogenization of various scholarly miscreants whom she blames for corrupting the youth even as the world burns. If there were a sweepstakes for killing the buzz of human rights triumphalism, I personally can claim to have won: Sikkink criticizes me 30 times in the book, compared to merely 25 times for Stephen Hopgood and 20 for Eric Posner. I only wish I could claim my winnings—but it turns out that I ought not take credit for what Sikkink says I contributed.

Contrary to Sikkink’s claim, I did not argue that Jimmy Carter created human rights, nor that the Global South had no role in their history, nor that there were no relevant antecedents in the 1940s to their ascendancy today. In a chapter of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010) that Sikkink indicts, I dealt with Carter for about 8 of 55 pages, toward its end, arguing that a variety of grassroots actors transformed the unpromising legacy of the past—notably declarations and treaties negotiated by state elites—into a new sort of phenomenon. Contrary to Sikkink, I have not argued more recently that human rights are a neoliberal plot. In fact, just the reverse: in writing that Sikkink cites, as well as in my own new book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018), I explicitly reject that position to ponder instead how human rights, focused at most on the misery of the poor distributionally, could fit in the age of galloping inequality and the victory of the rich. I would have appreciated more evidence of scholarly engagement with what others have written in Evidence for Hope, especially because the point of my scholarship on human rights is not to condemn hope or deny evidence for it but to call for a more radical form of hope than Sikkink apparently believes credible.

More broadly, Sikkink’s understanding of the state of play of the field of the history of human rights often feels a little off, oversimplifying her own task. No one thinks that nothing happened when it came to the governmental declaration of human rights in the 1940s, including in Latin America, on which she concentrates in one chapter. As a result, the modest and truncated historical research Sikkink presents there leads to the non sequitur that some people then cared about human rights, as if that were sufficient response to the extant conversation among historians. It is not. (How many cared? Were they elites or masses? What were their larger regional geopolitics? What global political economy did they envision? What was the connection to the rediscovery of human rights decades later?) Similar reservations apply to Sikkink’s attempted intervention into the ongoing conversation about how to correlate human rights and neoliberalism, in which she not only reverses my own position but also ignores critical but essential voices like Paul O’Connell or Umut Öszu or Jessica Whyte.

Reading her book, I also sometimes wondered about the legitimacy and effectiveness of helping oneself to arguments that target not the claims that one’s elective foes have offered, but instead the susceptibility of one’s audience to persuasion. For example, Sikkink conjectures that downers are more likely to gain a hearing than enthusiasts for a cause (p. 162). But is not collective life over the millennia little more than a compilation of fervors for the gullible as varying as fashion trends are for the stylish? She tells stories about how irritating it is to send students to take classes with her colleagues in “critical theory” only to have to undo the damage they inflict (pp. 55–56). But given that Sikkink has written a whole book engaging “critical theory,” on some level she must intuit that there are intellectual rewards for doing so.

Beyond the limitations of Sikkink’s critiques of a set of minor academics she magnifies into enemies of progress in Evidence for Hope is a somewhat better book about the reasons for excitement about human rights movements and the need to grant their genuine successes. Sikkink is on much firmer ground when it comes to international relations controversies about measuring the effects of various human rights initiatives. I have no doubt that some human rights technologies have made a difference, especially because along the way Sikkink herself acknowledges that others like humanitarian military intervention have too often made the world worse.

The only worry I have about Sikkink’s enterprise of claiming specific effects for human rights advocacy is that she has not thought much about the characteristic dilemma that success brings with it: whether to stick to the promotion of a few core values or to volunteer for the resolution of larger problems. Especially because Sikkink finished her book as the much-discussed populist wave kicked off, it already reads as mostly superannuated, claiming modest but real effects for the signature moral concept of the post–Cold War world but not anticipating the increased political upheaval of our time. Others facing the crisis, such as United Nations expert Philip Alston, have been far more accommodating of critics of human rights and far more open about the need for the movement either to evolve or else make way for alternative responses to backsliding or worse.

Sikkink is convincing that human rights values and some forms of mobilization around them are going to be essential, on the strength of their past successes, however much such successes are eroding now. Whether those values and movements are enough on their own to provide the best hope for a better world is another matter—and this book provides no evidence either way.