Miseria planificada. Derechos humanos y neoliberalismo

Contemporary societies are currently experiencing a comprehensive crisis that affects all their institutional forms and threatens to become a ‘crisis of legitimacy’. A critical analysis of transnational human rights requires the adoption of a “deep perspective”, free from the prevailing fatalism and moralism, which allows us to recover the political dimension of human rights. Since its rise alongside market fundamentalism and liberal democracy to the podium of the new moral order of globalised capitalism, the transnational human rights movement has become captive to its myths. Whatever the future holds for them (reinventing themselves, or giving way to an alternative “utopia”), human rights require “demystification”. The growing suspicion that transnational human rights and “neoliberalism” have acted in tandem demands a historical clarification of how the temporal coincidence of their parallel and meteoric triumph over other preceding social imaginaries and their global institutionalisation since the 1970s can be considered the fruit of a fortuitous circumstance, the sign of a causal link, or complicity with crimes that today are beginning to be perceived as “the greatest atrocity” and the result of a “planned misery”.