Postwar human-rights lawyers deliberately repurposed rights language away from anti-colonialism toward US power

Evidence

In response to the human rights ‘crisis’ of his time, this dean of human rights law laid out a programme for what Joseph Slaughter calls ‘the hi-jacking of human rights’ - that is, he sought to win the language away from anticolonialists, who used it to defend self-determination and anti-racism, and reinvent human rights as an (apolitical) adjunct to US power. The central premise of this programme was that there was no necessary conflict between the particular interests of the United States and the universal values of ‘humanity’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 449

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s human-rights discourse literature; Slaughter’s ‘hi-jacking of human rights’ resonating with critiques of the depoliticized human-rights regime in postcolonial and critical legal studies. — connects to: Liberal human rights discourse actually licensed powerful states’ interventions for their corporations — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 287; Human-rights language served to restrain postcolonial popular sovereignty — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 295; Human rights language was mobilized against demands for postcolonial economic redistribution. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 379 (+3 more)
• SEED: A possible essay angle: the active, deliberate deployment of ‘human rights’ as geopolitical strategy versus its neutral, universalist self-presentation.

Broader Connections

• Anti-colonial rights advocates unwittingly armed later coercive interventions in global capitalism’s interests #corroborates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 273
• Human-rights rhetoric can relocate redress authority toward imperial overseers #expands (0.78)
• Human rights and democracy discourse replaced older imperial justifications for war #expands (0.72) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 403