Powerless companions or fellow travellers? : human rights and the neoliberal assault on post-colonial economic justice

In recent years, a number of scholars have sought to understand the simultaneous rise, from the late 1970s, of neoliberalism and an individualistic politics of human rights. To date, much of this discussion has focused on Latin America, where human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International came to prominence for contesting the policies of torture, murder and disappearance that accompanied neoliberal ‘shock therapy’, while generally turning their attention away from its economic effects.5 This context produces a picture of human rights NGOs as either valiant opponents of state violence, or, in a more critical vein, as operating as what Naomi Klein calls a set of ‘blinders’ that divert attention from the economic and structural causes of state violence.6 For the influential historian of human rights Samuel Moyn, the international human rights movement has been no more than a ‘powerless companion’ of the rise of neoliberalism, condemned to look on but unable to hold back the tide of free market restructuring.7 In a recent book, Moyn deems Klein’s account of human rights ‘exaggerated and implausible’, arguing that it ‘was not the job of human rights activists to save Marxism from its theoretical quandaries or the left from its practical failures.’ Neoliberalism and human rights were distinct movements, he argues, and ‘[n]eoliberalism, not human rights, is to blame for neoliberalism.’