At the turn of the new millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture began to embrace human rights in order to advance their own political goals.

While generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices, human rights are increasingly being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimise domination.

Using Israel/Palestine as a case study, Neve Gordon analyses the appropriations of human rights by liberal NGOs, security agencies, settler organisations, and extreme right nationalists, revealing how political actors advocating repression and abuse frequently invoke the language of human rights.

Gordon concludes the talk by asking what remains of human rights after their appropriation by right wing political projects and offers suggestions on how to liberate human rights so that they become a weapon of emancipation in the age of Trump.

This event is convened by the Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity Research Group, based in LSE Human Rights.

Neve Gordon is a Marie Curie Fellow and Professor of International Law at Queen Mary University of London. As a scholar, he writes about international law, human rights, the ethics of violence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and political theory. His opinion pieces appear frequently in the Nation, LA Times, Al Jazeera, and LRB.

Ayça Çubukçu (@ayca_cu) in an Assistant Professor in Human Rights in the Department of Sociology at LSE.

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