The Struggle over Human Rights

The Non-Aligned Movement, Jimmy Carter, and Neoliberalism

Courtney Hercus

The Struggle over Human Rights: The Non-Aligned Movement, Jimmy Carter, and Neoliberalism traces the origins of the relationship between neoliberalism and the modern doctrine of human rights to the 1970s. It uses empirical evidence to prove that the Carter administration transformed the U.S., and the traditional Western liberal approach to human rights, in response, in part, to the actions of the Non-Aligned Movement. The New International Economic Order (NIEO), a high-point in Non-Aligned solidarity, placed pressures on the power relations of the international system and sought to advance the social and economic rights of the Third World. Carter’s transformation promoted civil and political rights as the only acceptable “human” rights and relegated economic rights to a “basic needs” approach, undercutting welfare state principles in the U.S. and in the newly emergent independent states in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This doctrine, as the book highlights through extensive archival research, sharpened the definition of international human rights to serve the maintenance of the U.S.-led world order. Carter’s diplomatic use of human rights obfuscated exploitative economic structures and paved the way for an aggressive neoliberal transformation through World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programs under Reagan. Historical studies of human rights have ignored these connections, making this book a unique contribution to the scholarship of human rights.

Lexington Books

Pages: 224 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-7401-3 • Hardback • January 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-7402-0 • eBook • January 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Political Science / Human Rights, Political Science / American Government / National, Political Science / Public Policy / Social Policy, Political Science / American Government / General

The Struggle over Human Rights

The Non-Aligned Movement, Jimmy Carter, and Neoliberalism

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The Struggle over Human Rights: The Non-Aligned Movement, Jimmy Carter, and Neoliberalism traces the origins of the relationship between neoliberalism and the modern doctrine of human rights to the 1970s. It uses empirical evidence to prove that the Carter administration transformed the U.S., and the traditional Western liberal approach to human rights, in response, in part, to the actions of the Non-Aligned Movement. The New International Economic Order (NIEO), a high-point in Non-Aligned solidarity, placed pressures on the power relations of the international system and sought to advance the social and economic rights of the Third World. Carter’s transformation promoted civil and political rights as the only acceptable “human” rights and relegated economic rights to a “basic needs” approach, undercutting welfare state principles in the U.S. and in the newly emergent independent states in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This doctrine, as the book highlights through extensive archival research, sharpened the definition of international human rights to serve the maintenance of the U.S.-led world order. Carter’s diplomatic use of human rights obfuscated exploitative economic structures and paved the way for an aggressive neoliberal transformation through World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programs under Reagan. Historical studies of human rights have ignored these connections, making this book a unique contribution to the scholarship of human rights.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 224 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½

978-1-4985-7401-3 • Hardback • January 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-7402-0 • eBook • January 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Political Science / Human Rights, Political Science / American Government / National, Political Science / Public Policy / Social Policy, Political Science / American Government / General

Author

Courtney Hercus holds a doctorate in international relations from Macquarie University.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – The Historical Lineage of Twentieth Century Rights Discourse

Chapter 2 – Human Rights, The US and International Activism: 1941-1962

Chapter 3 – International Human Rights Activism Between 1963 and 1976: The Escalation of Concurrent Social Forces

Chapter 4 – Economic Rights and the Presidency of Jimmy Carter

Chapter 5 – The Legacy of Carter’s Human Rights Doctrine

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Reviews

“The Struggle over Human Rights delivers a granular critical theoretical analysis of the hegemonic struggle over human rights – elsewhere recognized as human wrongs – from its lineages in the twentieth century and into the post-Cold War era. Its honing in on how the Jimmy Carter administration narrowed the hegemonic definition of human rights in alignment with transnational capital makes this book an essential read.”
— Adam David Morton, University of Sydney

“Individual human rights, as propounded by the Carter administration, were deployed paradoxically to defeat of the non-aligned movement for a more equitable world order, this doctrine having developed in step with the transnationalization of capital in the 1970s. The Struggle over Human Rights stands as a model of critical political economy scholarship and is a tribute to the thinking of the late Robert Cox as the doyen of that strand of thought.”
— Kees van der Pijl, Professor Emeritus, University of Sussex

“In this well-researched book, Courtney Hercus provides a neo-Gramscian interpretation of the de-prioritization of social, economic, and cultural human rights. This interpretation emphasizes the hegemony of a particular interpretation of liberalism and ‘liberal world order’, within and beyond the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. By revealing how the Carter administration prioritized freedom from governmental action as the key to human rights, this book simultaneously reinforces the importance to human rights history of the counter-hegemonic, post-colonial projects of the 1960s, to which Carter felt the need to respond, and challenges the assumption that the Reagan presidency initiated the neo-liberalism that many people still see within contemporary human rights discourse.”
— David Karp, University of Sussex