Kathryn Sikkink’s work, alone and with collaborators, has been central to the human rights mainstream in political science for more than two decades. As a robust proponent of the progressive impact of human rights law and trials, she has given food for thought to those who, like me, doubt the ongoing impact of the global human rights regime. Even though we might deduce some concerns on her part from the shift in emphasis of her two most recent book titles—from The Justice Cascade (2011) to Evidence for Hope (2017)—she continues to make the case that human rights have a bright future in our turbulent world. In Evidence for Hope, she argues that human rights remain legitimate and effective. To counter arguments about their lack of legitimacy, she points to the supposed non-Western origins of human rights, the continued importance of the international human rights regime to positive human rights outcomes globally, and the ways in which human rights can be effective in tackling a range of social ills. As far as effectiveness is concerned, she argues that because we measure abuses more and better now, it seems things are getting worse when they actually are not. Bad news also gets more attention than good news. In sum, human rights institutions and laws have a future, and it is only repressive governments and skeptical academics like Samuel Moyn, Eric Posner, and me who think otherwise.

The core of my reservations about Sikkink’s claims is that she lacks any sense of the class basis of human rights and therefore of the deeper political forces at work that make them more or less effective over time. Sikkink is reasonably explicit in Evidence for Hope about her normative commitments, although she seems to have shifted her position from The Justice Cascade where she flirts with the idea of “moral instinct” (p. 261) to human rights as “a morally defensible starting place for talking about progressive change in the world” (Evidence, p. 15). In both cases, what drives normative change in the direction of liberal individualism is idealism unmoored in political realities. There is no doubt that the moral case for rights is powerful, but this is a minor part of explaining their prominence in the last few decades. We need to ask a more standard political science question: Who benefits?

Rights work structurally where and when they serve the interests of those whose money, influence, and votes are necessary to sustain them. This can mean progressive change, and Sikkink has led the way in identifying examples of it. But there is a hard limit. In the recent case of Europe, for example, refugees crossing the Mediterranean or fleeing Syria could wash up drowned on the beaches without a major outcry. Human rights are poor vehicles for radical change (e.g., economic redistribution, but also revisiting the social contract to advance the cause of nationalism), because the liberal elite behind them, whether explicitly or implicitly, are people whose power and influence come from the existing dispensation. This is one reason human rights advocates in the West are more interested in suffering in other areas of the world than in the existence of inequality and injustice in their own societies and why economic and social rights have not made a major impact on the domestic redistributive policies of wealthy states.

Here the battle is for democracy, not rights. It is for taking and using state power. This is not to say that radical social movements do not speak the language of rights or that there is not a vast variety of rights work going on at a national and local level worldwide. It is to say that the global human rights regime and its tribunes are financed and run by a global legal and social elite whose support comes from a segment of middle-class citizens committed to rights on moral, not political, grounds. They do not rely on human rights to advance their political interests. It is for this reason that the rise of populist politicians, with their fusing of welfarism with nationalism, and their association of human rights with cosmopolitan liberals, hardly features in Evidence for Hope.

This links to a second concern: the putative “Southern” origins of rights and the possibility that the global human rights regime will persist even if the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe as a whole sour on the rights project in an era of Western retrenchment. This overlooks the pivotal role that Western states have played for 200 years in globalizing multilateral institutions (under and then after empire) to project their power. Whatever the ethical and ideological origins of human rights, they became major features of the global political landscape in the 1970s and 1980s only when they became part of the foreign and domestic politics of liberal states with enough diplomatic muscle to make them meaningful (e.g., the United States and United Kingdom) and with populations of concerned affluent citizens who funded NGOs and campaigns to promote them within government and multilaterally. At their zenith from 1991 to 2011, these rights were seen as sovereignty curtailing (unless you were powerful enough to ignore them). Now sovereignty is back. There are liberal elites of varying sizes in many of the states that now aspire to a greater say in the running of the global system. But China, Russia, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and even Japan are not politically liberal and do not have a liberal rights tradition (unlike South America).

Even rhetorical compliance is no longer necessarily a requirement of membership in good standing in the international system. Syria’s Bashir al-Assad is about to prove that bombing hospitals pays as long as you have powerful friends; Saudi Arabia’s MBS is proving it too. Kim Jong-un got the red-carpet treatment from President Putin, while China runs vast Uighur concentration camps. Surely the erosion of the normative consensus on human rights at the global level and the reiteration of the primacy of sovereignty cast doubt on the future of human rights as the main normative mechanism of choice to pursue liberal conceptions of freedom. If we can no longer rely on international contractual agreement, the underlying ethical case— that people have moral rights—will have to be made more explicit (where it faces resistance on the basis of hypocrisy, historical crimes, authoritarian practices, and religious and cultural difference). Sikkink accuses human rights critics like me of comparing human rights to an implicit ideal. But she is the idealist. Human rights must be seen as historically and socially contingent. As such they can change, regress, diminish, and even disappear entirely.