We are delighted to share that our postdoc, Sarah Earnshaw, has published her first monograph. “Human Rights and Sovereign Standards in US Security: Freedom Will Be Defended” is now available from Routledge as part of the Advances in American History series.
The age of human rights ushered in by the establishment of the post-WWII liberal international order – in varying states of crisis – has undoubtedly also been an age of security, or rather, insecurity. In the self-proclaimed ‘land of the free’, individual rights are common parlance of US statecraft and foreign policy, at once fundamentally US-American yet universal values. Rather than above or beyond the nation state, this book traces the constellation of sovereign standards taken as common-sense in the international security purview of defending human freedom. From the mythologised congressional and Carter legacies of the 1970s, one can ponder how human rights moved from the Amnesty project of freeing prisoners of conscience to justifying military force; however, this is only part of the story: these articulations rest upon a contained reading of rights. How did the human rights records of other states become a problem of US security? Through the theoretical frame of the ‘regime of truth’ Earnshaw traces maps of meaning across political and cultural discourses on human rights to explore the consolidation of expertise, alternatives excluded, state forms rendered a threat, and policy responses then considered legitimate, even humane.
The supposed inability, or unwillingness, to provide fundamental freedoms is a central feature in the US presentation of postcolonial ‘failed’ and ‘rogue’ states: nodes of disorder and instability, that are then subject to increasingly preemptive pacification. While largely focused on contemporary history from the post-WWII Universal Declaration to drone war, Earnshaw critically engages with longer, entwined histories of International Relations and Law, such as Westphalian mythology, humanitarian intervention, and imperial aerial policing. A genealogy of human rights through the lens of US security imaginaries, this book interrogates notions of freedom, sovereignty, and war: in securing the human, what is defensible?
