Arguing that there has never been a consensus on which rights all people are entitled, Beyond Illiberalism: Rights, Rhetoric, and Reality in a Pluralistic World traces how the concept of human rights is tied to a global project rooted in colonialism and grounded in nineteenth-century liberalism and post-World War II social democratic principles.

This book contends that human rights are conceived, imagined, and promoted by dominant states, organizations, and activists within a specific liberal framework, and that, after more than 200 years, the dream of a universal history rooted in the worldview of G.W.F. Hegel has been displaced by the stuff of practical reality.

Robert J. Shepherd shifts our attention to rights as a matter of human practice and emphasizes the importance of the actualization of rights within local contexts, demonstrating the spuriousness of categorizing governments as "liberal" or "illiberal" based on preconceived notions of what counts as legitimate rights. This book will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, socio-legal studies, and cultural studies.

Speaker:

Robert Shepherd is editor in chief of the journal Critical Asian Studies and a course coordinator for the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Between 2002 and 2022 he taught courses on human rights, international development, and Asian Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Before this he worked on United Nations Development Program projects in China and Indonesia, and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal. He is the author of four books, including Faith in Heritage: Displacement, Development, and Religious Tourism in Contemporary China (Routledge 2013) and, most recently, Beyond Illiberalism: Rights, Rhetoric, and Reality in a Pluralistic World (Routledge, 2025)

Discussant:

Marlene Laruelle is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science and Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Laruelle works on the rise of populist and illiberal movements in post-Soviet Eurasia, Europe and the US. She is the former Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) and of the Central Asia Program (CAP).