This book is an ambitious and largely successful response to the growth in skepticism about the norms and efficacy of international human rights. Evidence for Hope attempts to address distinct critiques from several quarters for both academic and policy audiences—and inevitably achieves different levels of traction in these multifaceted aspirations. Above all, it is a welcome reminder of the pedagogical implications and social responsibility of academic critique. Kathryn Sikkink’s deconstruction of woolly associations between human rights and neoliberalism (see esp. pp. 38–48) and inaccurate assertions of Western bias that undermine hard work in hard times is a masterful corrective to trendy, ill-informed dismissals of human rights.

Evidence for Hope argues that human rights has more global and popular origins and effects than the critics claim. Sikkink supports this argument with two historical and two empirical chapters; although all four chapters are framed as scholarly essays, the historical chapters resonate more with the legitimacy claims of academic origin stories, whereas the empirical chapters speak more directly to policy effectiveness. Chapter 3’s account of the transnational construction of postwar human rights institutions successfully counters the false characterization of human rights as a Western-imposed elite legality. In tandem, Chapter 4 establishes the Cold War record of human rights as a mode of resistance to varied forms of repression, intended to broaden the legitimacy claim but also speaking to the dynamics of effectiveness despite bipolar hegemony. These essays would be even more effective if situated in a broader arc of human rights history alongside the work of other scholars (e.g., Micheline Ishay, The History of Human Rights, 2004).

The following chapters turn to questions of measurement and efficacy, with equal rigor but more constrained impact. Sikkink mounts the revisionist case for a relative improvement in human rights conditions and monitoring bias parallel to Steven Pinker’s assessment of declining violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). She introduces the useful alternative framework of a compliance continuum, although some of the improvement data are overly aggregated. Country-level improvement in Cingranelli and Richards’s (CIRI) Physical Integrity Rights indexes or decreasing numbers of episodes of war may conceal not only the numbers affected and the incidence of vulnerability in large autocracies like China but also the character and systemic impact of a single “incident” like the Syrian civil war that has produced a decline in rights far beyond a casualty count: a complex of death, torture, disability, imprisonment, forced displacement, destitution, sexual violence, and the loss of education and health care affecting many millions throughout the region and beyond. Although she advances debate by emphasizing that evaluation of trends must be “compared to what,” the next step is to analyze “when and where”—to map shifting patterns of repression and victimization across the range of rights, as well as to reconstruct what works in issue-specific responses and sequences (for such an attempt, see my 2018 book, The Future of Human Rights)

More proactively, the comprehensive review of evidence on drivers and responses to human rights violations in Chapter 6 offers nuanced analysis and policy guidance that draw on a wide range of scholarship. This chapter brings together assessments of war and military intervention, democratization, economic development and inequality, treaty compliance, transitional justice, exclusionary ideologies, and social movement mobilization. Only in the later section on NGOs, however, does Sikkink review concrete situated studies alongside general trends and project potential improvements in response—not just “what works” but also how to make it work better. In this section, Sikkink discusses dilemmas of North–South organizational relationships, but could go further to examine translation and grassroots reconstruction of rights (as do Steven J. Stern and Scott Straus in The Human Rights Paradox, 2014). Moreover, there is a gap between the discussion of exclusionary ideologies as drivers and the strategy of naming and shaming. Although the latter is usefully reconnected to Sikkink’s own earlier work on information politics (Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 1998), the current text overlooks the substantial subsequent literature on the impact of the framing of rights claims on efficacy (for example, see Melissa Labonte, Human Rights and Humanitarian Norms, Strategic Framing, and Intervention, 2013).

The book’s dialectical origins in debates with a particular set of leading critics such as Samuel Moyn and Stephen Hopgood is a source not only of clarity but also some narrowness: in most chapters only a handful of authors are cited repeatedly to counter specific challenges (as discussed earlier, Chapter 6 is a laudably broader survey that picks up a wider range of issues). Sikkink defines human rights as comprised of “law, institutions, and movements,” as the critics set the terms of debate, resulting in a less systematic treatment of the most dynamic developments in intersectional economic, social, and cultural rights (on transnational LGBT movements, the right to water, indigenous peoples, and labor rights, see Alison Brysk and Michael Stohl eds., Expanding Human Rights, 2017, especially chapters by Philip Ayoub, Madeline Baer, Felipe Gomez Isa, and Shareen Hertel). There is valuable material in Sikkink’s “Suggestions for Further Reading” that points toward a more global perspective and the movement from human rights regime to repertoire, but the book would have been strengthened by fuller integration of these authors and projects.

Sikkink’s timely volume provides “evidence for hope” indeed and is a useful, thoughtful, and rigorous counter to naïve disillusionment and totalizing counsels of despair. Although the book makes a signal contribution to the history and analysis of human rights, it inevitably could go further to provide the tools for “making human rights work in the 21st century.” Fortunately, Sikkink’s unfolding research agenda and vocation for engaged dialogue hold the promise of further progress toward this ambitious and critical goal.