Coda

Summary

Although individualist human rights achieved supremacy in the 1990s, they found themselves the center of a series of crises in the early 2000s. Perhaps the most horrific of these was the US government’s mobilization of human rights to justify its brutal invasion of Iraq. Human rights began to lose its luster. The growing rejection of human rights was only one aspect of a generalized crisis across the North Atlantic. By the 2010s, fissures appeared in every sphere of life, putting the entire political order into question. Today, people are searching for alternative ways of doing politics. In this context, it is imperative that we return to the anti-imperialist politics of the 1960s and 1970s. This is not simply to draw lessons, but to find a way to relate to these prior attempts to change the world. After all, those of us who care about making the world a better place are faced with a vexing problem: some of the most popular, inspiring, and revolutionary forms of anti-imperialism were intimately tied to the far left, and above all Leninism, a project that not only fell short of its goals, but whose undeniable failures in some cases led to terrible disaster. It is only by taking stock of this history, and finding a way to reconcile ourselves to it, that we can rethink emancipatory internationalist politics today.