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Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), ISBN 9780801452376, 255 pages.
That human rights norms and claims are in crisis today is not in dispute. The climate for effective, let alone presumed, fair international human rights mobilizations and actions has deteriorated dramatically in the twenty-first century. As any newspaper headline shows, the institutional apparatus designed to safeguard people at risk is deployed only selectively and demands for justice and accountability are listened to sporadically. The 2003 United States invasion of Iraq showed just how seamlessly the post-Cold War project of "humanitarian intervention" morphed into unilateral war and occupation. The defense of sovereignty and national interests is loudly announced in international affairs. It is no wonder Stephen Hopgood writes that we are living today in the end times of human rights. With this book he joins an increasing number of interdisciplinary scholars who cast a critical eye on human rights histories and developments. Their operative language is more about entanglement, unintended consequences, the politics of life, and imperialist strategies of rule and bio-power. This marks a notable shift in scholarship away from the optimism and linear progressive interpretations of the 1 990s, when human rights as a research topic first moved beyond its core amid political scientists and international law scholars. Hopgood's book, indeed, is written for its times, with particularly trenchant insights into patterns and practices over the last several decades. But it is also problematical in its historical interpretations and sweeping arguments.
Hopgood states that his book is not a history: "It is an argument,"1 perhaps even a polemic. That is correct; it is not a history, but not in the way he believes. He has written a grand narrative of the historical development of humanitarian practices all the way through to today's ethical and political conundrums, replete with most of the trappings of historical methodology. It has a bounded chronology: the problems of today started in the mid-nineteenth century, (notably in 1863 with the Geneva conference), employing periodization, and developing transitional moments as, for example, in the decade of the 1970s. Most notably, Hopgood identifies a historical agent of change responsible for the emergence, development, and ongoing expansion of humanitarian sentiments and actions: the new European...