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International Human Rights–A Messy Business

LoraWildenthal’s newest book offers a model for historicizing the recent past with a specific focus on human rights. While Samuel Moyn’s 2010 manifesto on the history of human rights unleashed excitement and controversy within the field and undoubtedly turned historians’ aention to the need for rigorously researched and historically grounded works on the subject, Wildenthal is one of the first to demonstrate successfully what this looks like in a monograph-length study.[1] Hers is a refreshingly concrete, non-moralistic account of human rights in practice as well as a fascinating retelling of the West German political narrative. Wildenthal’s analytic framework is discernible from the book’s title. Rather than approach human rights as a set of universal claims or the culmination of a centurieslong civilizing process (of and by Europeans), Wildenthal insists that we acknowledge human rights as no more– but also no less–than they are: a language of political strategy. As such, she argues, human rights, or the set of legal norms they presume, are open to use and, just as crucially, to interpretation by a wide variety of actors. Wildenthal wisely skirts the false, if comforting distinction between a “genuine” use of human rights language and that which is merely cynical. is frees her to pursue a richer cast of characters than would otherwise be possible and in so doing, allows for an inspection of the complexity and moral messiness of human rights advocacy in postwar West Germany–the temporal and geographical focus of Wildenthal’s study. Instead of a tale of like-minded activists, we see the outlines of an entangled political network capable of connecting deeply conservative agendas to those of a more leist and liberal nature.