Human Rights Enforcement and the Moral and Intellectual Leadership of Hegemony

Abstract

The previous chapter provided an overview of the structure of the late-modern GPE. It was argued that this is characterized by a development of a new form of hegemony which is global, meaning based on increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized sets of relations, institutions and values, mediated by agents but not reducible to their individual intentions or capabilities. This chapter will examine a range of cases of post-Cold War human-rights enforcement and their relationship with this emerging hegemonic structure. In doing so, the aim is to contextualize these cases, develop a holistic analysis of them, and uncover their causal relations with the structure of the late-modern GPE.