Kathryn Sikkink’s Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century provides a sweeping and optimistic view of contemporary human rights. It speaks to academics, activists, policy makers, and the public and seeks to drive home the point that, although human rights are imperfect, they are the best tools we have to improve the human condition. Through a long and thorough discussion of the relevant literature and a wide variety of empirical examples, ranging from the development of regional and international human rights covenants to increased accountability for perpetrators, Sikkink shows that human rights laws, institutions, and activism can—and do—matter.

Sikkink’s book is a response to the current zeitgeist of pessimism around human rights, which includes a recent tide of policy debates, public discourse, and academic research (see, for example, Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 2013; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, 2010; and Eric Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights, 2014). These skeptics have argued that human rights laws, institutions, and activism have either peaked, failed to matter, or, worse, created perverse incentives that worsen, rather than ameliorate, human rights conditions. Collectively, this focus on the examples of human rights laws, institutions, and activists not working has skewed the scholarly literature and in doing so has obscured the causal processes that help us explain what human rights tools work—or not—and under which conditions. A course correction is sorely needed, and Evidence for Hope is a solid step in that direction.

In the first section of the book, Sikkink takes the human rights skeptics to task. She advances the argument that such human rights skepticism is a function of measurement error, rather than empirical reality. She argues that the opacity around the benchmarks that scholars and practitioners use to measure progress or regression in human rights makes it seem like human rights conditions are getting worse. Yet, these benchmarks fail to take into account a host of philosophical, psychological, and technical concerns, including comparison to an ideal, negativity bias, and increased reporting. When we take these and related factors seriously, Sikkink argues, it becomes clearer that there is good reason to believe that human rights laws, institutions, and activists have advanced human rights outcomes and that they will continue to do so. I would add to Sikkink’s argument that it is incumbent on us as scholars to define the universe of human rights outcomes and processes in which we are interested more broadly so that we can evaluate the good, the bad, and the neutral outcomes using our deep social-scientific toolbox.

In the second section of the book, which in many ways is a love letter to the Latin American human rights community, Sikkink rethinks the historiography of human rights, and to good effect. She documents how the Global South in general and Latin America in particular were in the avant-garde of international human rights developments in the early to mid-twentieth century and have not solely been the reluctant recipients of such laws and institutions in recent years. Although Sikkink’s careful research shifts the geography of human rights historiography, it does not as adequately address the goal that she sets out for this section of the book: understanding the legitimacy of human rights laws, institutions, and proponents. Part of this shortcoming is derived from an ambiguous operationalization of legitimacy in international politics. More problematic, however, is that, even though she links the origin stories of human rights to their (perceived) legitimacy, these two threads—the perceived legitimacy of human rights and their historical development—are never fully woven together in this section’s chapters.

The third section of the book turns to the other main concept that Sikkink aims to assess: the effectiveness of international human rights laws, institutions, and activism. She identifies six conditions that improve human rights. These conditions, ranging from ending impunity to diminishing war and promoting democracy, are all rooted in the academic literature. Sikkink adds to this scholarship by providing descriptive data on how trends around these factors have improved over time. Although this descriptive data, supported by mini-case studies and anecdotes, are convincing with respect to the general relationship between particular conditions and human rights outcomes, there is too little discussion about the causal mechanisms driving each of these relationships. Moreover, there is an endogeneity or circularity to the relationship between and across these factors and human rights that is not fully addressed in this section of the book. For example, democracy can improve human rights, which can decrease the likelihood of war, which can in turn facilitate more human rights mobilization. This endogeneity is not inconsistent with Sikkink’s argument; rather it is simply underexplored. As such, there is both an opportunity and a need to disentangle these relationships, and I hope that Sikkink and her colleagues take up this charge in future research.

Evidence for Hope is not a treatise of unbridled enthusiasm. Throughout the book, Sikkink readily identifies the challenges ahead, but she consistently reminds the reader that not only is social change possible but also that it might be even more realizable than our era of pessimism would suggest. So what can be done? Early in the book, Sikkink provides one answer to this question. She writes, “I believe we must be prepared to critique and propose” (p. 31). In other words, activists, policy makers, the public, and scholars have a responsibility not to burn the house of human rights down, but rather to repair the parts that are broken in a smarter, more research-based way.