The Concrete Utopia: Looking Backward into the Future of Human Rights

Concrete Utopia conceptualizes the human rights project of the last two and a half centuries as a backward-looking endeavor, which, in order to move forward, must return to the utopian roots of its foundational documents.

Human rightsadvance by judging the ills ofthe present world from a standpointin the future wheretheymightno longer exista fundamentally utopian gesture.This peculiar character of human rights makes them continually ripe for reinvention and for responding to changing world circumstances.Looking at topics such as the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s, public outrage to the Vietnam War, the US civil rights movement and the founding of Amnesty International in 1961, this book surveys the history of human rights andhow they have beenreconceived at different points in time.It closes by sketchingthe way they maybere-envisioned for new strugglesin the 21st century.

At a timewhenthe human rights project has endured criticismfor being toothless orevenforproviding a pretext for militaryinvasions, Kaleck argues that the current global crises, from inequality, to ecological collapse and theage of pandemics,can becounteredbyreinventinghuman rightsworkthrough feminist, decolonial and ecologicalinterventions.