Problems of commitment to, compliance with, and the influence of international human rights norms are now mainstream concerns to political scientists. Prominent scholars of international relations and comparative politics, not to mention political theory and law, have sought to document empirical patterns and posit theoretical frameworks for understanding the potential and limitations of human rights institutions and discourse. The eclectic nature of human rights scholarship manifests itself in these three volumes, all of which aim to problematize one salient facet of human rights and to offer, with varying degrees of insight, answers to the identified challenge.

Stephen Hopgood’s volume is the most polemical of the three and will likely be of interest to the widest audience given its relative accessibility and the sometimes-heated debate that has surrounded it. As the title suggests, Hopgood argues that we may be witnessing the ultimate demise of human rights as an organizing principle for global progress. In his view, late nineteenth-century humanism was the secular replacement for a Christian God with institutions like the International Red Cross acting as its churches. The Holocaust destroyed the moral authority of Europe and this brand of humanism along with it. The 1970s, however, saw a drastic increase in human rights activism in the United States, resulting in the U.S. government being pressured to evangelize the new secular doctrine of “Human Rights.” The United States was keen to oblige given that it could use the language of human rights in its ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. By the 1990s the world was in its U.S.-dominated “unipolar moment” and human rights were at their apogee, but the human rights cause had lost its moral authority by siding with U.S. interests during the Cold War. The weakening moral power of human rights along with the declining material power of the United States suggests that the days of human rights are numbered.

It is an analytical story worth consideration, but what distinguishes this volume, and what may detract from its core message in the eyes of some academic readers, is the tone in which it is communicated. The author is caustic in his assessments of global human rights agencies “who assume unto themselves the right to speak for everyone” (p. IX) and have staff with “plush offices and high salaries” (p. 178). Hopgood laments the loss of an “ethic of sacrifice” that according to him used to accompany the humanitarian and human rights movements (p. 178–179). The project of international justice is “an instrument for advancing an ideology” (p. 132) that disregards victims of political violence because “it is now almost entirely about itself” (p. 29). The international human rights movement more generally is an imposed “illusion” (p. 96), perhaps better called the “Human Rights Empire” (p. 119–141), whose “true achievement” has been to turn its “ideology into facts on the ground” (p. 6) by placing “why questions out of bounds” (p. 8).

Beyond a less bitter tone, the book would benefit from a more focused, clearer, and more systematic use of evidence. Claims like “the best hope for human rights may lie with shale gas” development in the United States (p. 169), for example, demand more careful empirical and theoretical consideration than is given in the book. The thirteen-page interlude about the architecture of the International Criminal Court and the United Nations building (pp. 80–93) is reminiscent of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State but is not argued with the same rigor or theoretical depth. The chapter on the rise of autocracies and the return of religious zeal around the world (pp. 142–165) draws somewhat selectively on a smattering of evidence from Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Russia, and various religious groups.

More generally and importantly, the central question that Hopgood poses at the outset—“How different would the world really look without the multibillion-dollar humanitarian, human rights, and international justice regimes?” (p. 2)—is the subject of a growing scholarly literature that receives only tangential mention in his text. Since the book itself does not offer an answer, those wishing to seriously consider the counter-factual would likely be better served elsewhere, namely by empirical scholarship that addresses similar questions more directly. Looking forward, the author places his hope in the daily struggles of human rights by ordinary people at the local level as opposed to imperialistic “Human Rights” at the global level, but devotes less space to elaborating the complexities, ambiguities, and limitations of the former than he does attempting to skewer the latter.

The volume edited by Steve Stern and Scott Straus takes up this very problem of global and local modalities. The book is organized around what they call the “human rights paradox,” namely that while human rights are global and universal by their very nature, “humans realize their rights only in particular places with particular instruments and with particular protections” (p. 3). Human rights, according to the editors, are mutually constituted by the two elements of this paradox: “human rights are only imaginable with appeal to the global and universal, but they are only concrete when they are local” (p. 4). This contradiction, in their view, “always structures human rights” (p. 9). Rather than fleeing from the contradiction, the editors have built their volume around it by assembling an eclectic set of essays that map and analyse points of intersection between the global and local. The essays are all strong, although readers will likely invest their time in reading those bearing on specific subject matter of interest to them. Space limitations preclude a discussion of each chapter, but three are especially noteworthy.

One particularly innovative contribution is Foster Lynch’s study of how residents of two villages in Burundi (that by virtue of their demographics were prime candidates for violence) actually managed to stave off some of the worst bloodshed in that country’s civil war (at least for a time). Drawing systematically on interview evidence, the author finds that residents were motivated to work for peace not by abstract notions of human rights, but rather by self-preservation. The upshot, in her view, is that the best way to promote the desired ends of human rights may not be achieved through appeals to human rights. The chapter by Patrick Vinck and Phuong N. Pham presents survey evidence on the attitudes of people from Northern Uganda, Eastern DRC, and Cambodia toward various approaches to justice for political violence. This kind of evidence is useful in transcending the global/local dichotomy and revealing the complex and sometimes contradictory feelings that people may have about a concept as contested as “justice.” Furthermore, the authors make a laudable attempt to clarify the implications of their research, concluding that international courts and justice processes should recognize the sometimes unrealistic expectations that victims have about court proceedings and consult in good faith and on equal footing with victims to mutually align expectations. Finally, Jo-Marie Burt's chapter on accountability for human rights violations committed in Peru is a nuanced and insightful piece with a clear grounding in a deep knowledge of Peru. She documents and discusses patterns found in her database of 250 cases of human rights trials and in so doing, reveals complexity and contentiousness at the domestic and subnational levels surrounding efforts at transitional justice.

While the individual contributions are strong and the synthesis work done by the editors is effective, the implications for a broader research agenda are left somewhat underdeveloped. The editors call for attention to human agency and relationships in human rights scholarship as well as consideration for the shifting and contingent nature of the development of human rights. At its most general, this approach would call for interdisciplinary scholarship consisting of “deeply contextualized multilevel analysis, simultaneously attentive to local as well as global terrains of struggle over human rights, and to grounded study of efforts at mediation across distinct levels of human action” (p. 10). For answering some types of questions, this approach is sensible and appropriate, but for other types of questions (e.g. cross-national comparison or macro-historical inquiry) such a framework may confront challenging obstacles. Indeed while the authors acknowledge the appropriateness of a variety of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives, it is difficult to envision how this agenda will incorporate and speak to research that is not presented in the case study format. A “deeply contextualized multilevel analysis” is a laudably high standard of research, and many of the volumes' contributions approach it, but more discussion by the project's leaders about how the methods necessary to achieve this ideal could speak to other modes of inquiry would have been useful for the projects’ interdisciplinary aims.

The volume edited by Andreas Føllesdal, Johan Karlsson Schaffer, and Geir Ulfstein narrows its focus to one problematic issue for the theory of human rights: “why should the government of a sovereign state consider an international human rights regime to rightly influence or constrain its political discretion?” (p. 4). After all, the leadership of international human rights organizations like regional commissions, human rights courts, or United Nations human rights agencies, is usually not elected. Citizens of states that have committed to such institutions are rarely given the opportunity to vote on or engage with their activities. And yet human rights regimes do often influence the behavior of even democratic states; which on the surface appears profoundly at odds with democratic accountability. Given that one cannot rely on democratic grounds for constructing an account of the legitimacy of international human rights, how would a persuasive case be built? At the outset the authors usefully distinguish between “subjective legitimacy” (how the members of community feel about the institution) and “objective legitimacy” (whether the institution is morally justifiable) as an organizing idea for the volume (p. 13).

Within this framework each chapter addresses a different problem of the legitimacy of international human rights regimes vis-a-vis states. The chapters are dense, challenging, and occasionally would have benefited from a firmer editorial hand. Yet if one perseveres, there are extremely illuminating insights to be found in this volume. The contribution by Kristen Hessler, for example, is a clear and persuasive case for basing the legitimacy of United Nations treaty bodies on their role in helping states to improve their performance, thereby helping to achieve the ultimate goal of the equal moral standing of citizens. This transcends the implicit hierarchy posed by the volume's central question and conceptualizes international human rights bodies more as partners of states rather than as sitting above them attempting to dictate their behavior. The essay by Ian Hurd is a strikingly insightful mediation on U.S. disposition toward the Convention Against Torture under the George W. Bush administration. Hurd argues that norms against torture have high degrees of subjective and objective legitimacy and that states want to be seen as compliant even if they plan to employ torture in some cases. Hence states deploy formulations like “enhanced interrogation” or “coercive measures” as euphemisms for torture to allow them to violate the norms without sullying their reputations for compliance.

Taken together the chapters approach questions of legitimacy from a variety of angles. For readers grappling with similar theoretical problems, this volume will be indispensable. Those concerned with democratic theory and experiments in global forms of democracy will also find this collection of essays useful as democracy, and its presumed legitimacy, serves as both backdrop and interlocutor throughout the volume. Those wishing to build a critique of the volume's approach may start with the dichotomy drawn between international regimes on the one hand and states on the other. The central insight of constructivist international relations scholarship is that states and the international environment (including international human rights regimes) are mutually constitutive, thereby complicating a firm juxtaposition of sovereign states and human rights bodies. Furthermore, the state is implicitly theorized as looking “up” toward human rights bodies, but a prominent body of human rights literature understands states as more concerned with pressures emanating from their populations “below.” That civil society groups frequently use international human rights regimes to press their governments for change complicates any framework of legitimacy that presumes a dyadic relationship between states and human rights regimes.

Ultimately these volumes all contribute to the scholarship about the influence and legitimacy of human rights in various ways. The problems they each identify are considered with varying degrees of rigor and clarity, but all stimulate debate and consideration of how human rights, and those who study it, should proceed.