Given this book's title, I assumed that it would consist mainly of elaborations of already over-rehearsed debates about the “trade-offs” between “liberty” and “security.” And while it does include plenty of this, several chapters in this volume offer thoughtful, nuanced analyses which challenge the dichotomous rhetoric of the day, and force the reader to rethink not just the future, but also the nature, of contemporary human rights and security.

In compiling the essays for this volume, it is clear that some effort has been put into ensuring that the authors speak with more than a single voice. While most of the contributors do make some version of the argument that liberal values—including civil and political rights and the rule of law—should not be sacrificed at the altar of “national security,” there are chapters that seek to present alternative views, including Thomas Cushman's challenging “The Human Rights Case for the War in Iraq.” Most thought provoking, however, are the chapters which contest the conventional framing of debates, and problematize the concept of human rights itself. For example, in his chapter, “Eight Fallacies about Liberty and Terror,” David Luban clearly demonstrates how the “whole conversation about ‘trade-offs' conceals persistent fallacies; there is no real trade-off taking place, he argues, when ‘your’ rights are being traded off for ‘my’ security” (242–243). He points out (as do other contributors in the volume) that rights are themselves forms of security, and that the tendency to regard the current debate as one between “realists” and “idealists” rests upon yet another unhelpful dichotomy (245, 247). Luban also addresses the thorny problem of the presumption of terrorists’ guilt, an issue central to Geoffrey Robertson's chapter, “Fair Trial for Terrorists?” In his short but historically rich analysis, Robertson demonstrates with reason and clarity why trials for terrorists can never be “exquisitely fair,” since they are demonized by the society from which their judges and jurors are drawn, but why they must, as far as possible, conform to our “inherited Anglo-American traditions” of criminal justice (169). One of the most important reasons for this, he argues, is that the process of a fair trial itself tends to demystify dictators and terrorists by forcing them, and their followers, to confront their “hypocrisies and cruelties” (182).

However, the best chapters in the book are those that emphasize the fundamentally political nature of debates over rights, and which link ideas about rights to the agency and selfhood of real people in local contexts. John R. Wallach's critical analysis, for example, reminds us that human rights must be understood, especially today, as a “tool of the powerful.” For human rights to be meaningful, he argues, they must “extend beyond standard liberal rights guaranteed by security-conscious states partnered to global capitalism” (108, 131). He advocates, by contrast, an understanding of human rights as “a political ethics of the governed,” focusing on the “local and social conditions that promote democracy” (132). This emphasis on the need to “take back the local” is also central to Carol Greenhouse's excellent chapter. Greenhouse rejects the idea that the debate between security and civil liberties is primarily a value conflict, arguing instead that, in practice, what we are talking about is a restructuring of political space that is, in effect, “widening [the] distance between national government and local political life” (186). Finally, Peter Galison and Martha Minow remind us that in order to understand the “hot” issues of the day, including our “right to privacy,” we need to dig beneath the rhetoric, and think about the connection between privacy and the emergence of the modern self, which can “experiment, relax, form and enjoy intimate connections and practice the development of ideas and beliefs for valued expression” (258).

With a few exceptions, however, the general approach of this volume is one of criticism of the effects of political power on human rights, rather than a thoroughgoing critique of the discursive power of the international human rights regime itself (see T. Evans, The Politics of Human Rights: A Global Perspective. London: Pluto Press, 2005). Given its subject matter, there is little reference in this book to race, ethnicity, gender, geopolitical exclusion and poverty. For example, only Mary Robinson makes any real reference to women and gender; in her chapter, she refers, strikingly, to the situation of women in zones of conflict and in post-conflict zones as a “widespread form of terrorism” (311). While she may not have intended it, her use of the term “terrorism” in this volume to describe the relentless, widespread violence against women—violence that has and will occur before, during and after 9/11—destabilizes the gendered dominant discourse of rights and security, and forces the reader to confront the terror which rarely makes headlines. This includes the structural violence of grinding, terrifying poverty which affects millions of women, men and children, people for whom the “terrible attacks of 9/11 had no discernible impact” (310). It is this hard truth, perhaps more than any other, that needs to be remembered when addressing the most “pressing” human rights issues of the day.