Major human rights NGOs drew on the neoliberal account of rights.

Evidence

But the neoliberal human rights heritage was not only embraced by figures on the right. This neoliberal background can shed light on the apparent puzzle that the human rights politics of the late twentieth century, with its distinctive use of international advocacy to limit the power of the state, emerged, in Moyn’s words, ‘seemingly from nowhere’. I show that organisations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Médecins sans Frontières drew (explicitly in some cases, implicitly in others) on an account of rights developed by the neoliberals since the 1940s. For them, too, decolonisation had generated a desperate need for new standards to constrain postcolonial states. They focused their attention on what Hayek argued was the complement of the ‘taming of the savage’: the ‘taming of the state’. The attempt to discipline postcolonial states held a much larger place in the new politics of human rights than did the concerns with economic welfare and self-determination of previous decades. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Moyn’s thesis on the 1970s human rights turn; core to the reader’s advanced debate. — connects to: Neoliberalism converged with human rights activism around shared political aims. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 36; TV rights NGOs were powerless companions of 1970s-era neoliberalism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 43; Modern human rights NGOs narrowed their agenda to civil liberties under neoliberal ascendancy — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 148 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how explicit were Amnesty/HRW/MSF borrowings from Mont Pèlerin thought — evidence base?
• SEED: An essay angle: the human-rights movement as a state-disciplining project continuous with market fundamentalism.

Broader Connections

• Modern human rights NGOs narrowed their agenda to civil liberties under neoliberal ascendancy #corroborates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 148
• Human rights NGOs absorbed the neoliberal civil-society-versus-coercive-state dichotomy #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 60
• Human rights NGOs reinforced the neoliberal split between violent politics and peaceful markets #expands (0.82)
• Neoliberal reform shrank public-sector jobs and redirected educated Dalits into NGOs #expands (0.75) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 562