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Beyond the Last Utopia. About the historiography of human rights

Human rights is a highly contested concept in both current public debates and recent historiography. In this review essay the historiographical debate about human rights, in particular invoked by Samuel Moyn’s Last Utopia (2010), is analysed by discussing three recent monographs: Mark Bradley’s The World Reimagined (2016), Steven L.B. Jensen’s The Making of International Human Rights (2016), and Marco Duranti’s The Conservative Human Rights Revolution (2017). Although these books offer valuable insights into the much- debated ‘global breakthrough’ and chronology of human rights, their main contribution has to be located elsewhere: in ‘provincializing’ the foreign policy of the United States (Bradley), in pointing to unknown but influential actors and issues in the history of the United Nations (Jensen), and in providing a new perspective on the early days of European integration (Duranti). Based on this analysis, it is argued that human rights and their chronology should no longer be considered as a historiographical field in isolation, but that human rights must be investigated as part of broader political ideologies and practices, as a tool of marginalized countries and groups, and as a concept that enables historians better to understand relations between developments at the local and translocal level, and domestic and foreign policies.