Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World

Abstract

Recent histories of human rights identify the 1970s as the "breakthrough" period when they gained traction globally. However, most of the new historiographers adopt a restricted Americo-Eurocentric perspective that disregards events and peoples in the rest of the world as makers of human rights history. For many in the Global South, the Western "rediscovery" of human rights in the 1970s looks more like retrenchment and repossession, part of a larger "rollback" of Third World agendas to decolonize and reshape the international order. This same period saw an increased use of airline hijackings as a tactic of national liberation movements, which helped to speed a reversal in the official discourse on "terrorism." Together, these forces facilitated a neoliberal hijacking of human rights that delegitimized national self-determination, narrowed international concern to the plight of individual political prisoners, and realigned the moral economy of human rights.