Human rights NGOs absorbed the neoliberal civil-society-versus-coercive-state dichotomy

Evidence

In his major biography of the ‘International Human Rights Movement’, Aryeh Neier, the former head of Human Rights Watch, suggests that the rise of human rights coincided with a shift of Cold War rhetoric, from a focus on economic competition between communism and capitalism to one on the political conflict of ‘repression, or totalitarianism, versus liberty, or human rights’. I argue that major international human rights and humanitarian NGOs embraced the central neoliberal dichotomy between commercial or ‘civil society’ – understood as a realm of freedom, voluntary interaction and distributed, private power that checked the centralised power of the state – on the one hand, and politics, understood as violent, coercive and conflictual on the other. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 60

In his major biography of the ‘International Human Rights Movement’, Aryeh Neier, the former head of Human Rights Watch, suggests that the rise of human rights coincided with a shift of Cold War rhetoric, from a focus on economic competition between communism and capitalism to one on the political conflict of ‘repression, or totalitarianism, versus liberty, or human rights’. I argue that major international human rights and humanitarian NGOs embraced the central neoliberal dichotomy between commercial or ‘civil society’ – understood as a realm of freedom, voluntary interaction and distributed, private power that checked the centralised power of the state – on the one hand, and politics, understood as violent, coercive and conflictual on the other. They defended the same (anti-)political virtues the neoliberals attributed to the market: restraining political power, taming violence and facilitating a margin of individual freedom. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 60

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the specific meaning of ‘civil society’ in the neoliberal idiom: freedom, voluntary interaction, distributed private power.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in human-rights discourse converging with neoliberalism — parallels what Mosse and other chapters in this very book argue about NGOs depoliticizing poverty. — connects to: Human rights discourse flourished alongside welfare-state retrenchment and anti-revolutionary politics — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 8; Modern human rights NGOs narrowed their agenda to civil liberties under neoliberal ascendancy — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 148; Human rights NGOs reinforced the neoliberal split between violent politics and peaceful markets (+12 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘international human rights movement’ came of age precisely as welfare was dismantled, and quietly adopted the market’s anti-politics.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 60

Broader Connections

• Modern human rights NGOs narrowed their agenda to civil liberties under neoliberal ascendancy #corroborates (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 148
• Human rights NGOs reinforced the neoliberal split between violent politics and peaceful markets #expands (0.85)
• Neoliberals saw human rights standards as a way to depoliticize international economic relations #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 450