As claim-rights, human rights are relational in their structure. Every claim-right correlates with a duty owed to its holder; to hold a human right is therefore to stand in a directed normative relation to a duty-bearer. Yet theorists of human rights rarely examine this relation in its own right. This paper argues that human rights are “subject rights,” or the minimum claims persons hold, as subjects of rule, against those who rule them. This conception, I aim to show, better captures the characteristic features of human rights, and does so more determinately than alternative conceptions. The relation of rule gives human rights their determinate structure. It identifies who holds them, who bears the corresponding duties, and what they require. It also explains what makes human rights distinctively political without making them dependent on existing political practice.

Accounts of the liberal international order often tie its legitimacy to democratic convergence, making democratic backsliding appear a crisis of the order itself. This paper recovers an alternative conception from Kant, obscured by his popular reception in international relations theory, and traces it through Rawls’s Law of Peoples. While democratic backsliding may be normatively troubling, democratic homogeneity is not necessarily constitutive of liberal international order; its defining feature may instead be a justificatory orientation among states.

International human rights institutions are commonly evaluated in terms of state consent and compliance, but these approaches overlook a distinctive political function of human rights institutions. These institutions serve as sites of justification, establishing the terms and channels through which states are called upon to justify exercises of political power. Institutional design shapes the form this justificatory relationship takes. The Universal Periodic Review constructs a reciprocal relationship of peer answerability among states; treaty bodies such as the Human Rights Committee authorize independent experts to demand an accounting of state conduct according to human rights treaties. I argue that persistent contestation within these institutions can itself be evidence of their legitimacy. States that continue to argue within an institution recognize it as an authoritative arena in which claims must be made and answered.

Standard interpretations of Rawls’s Law of Peoples treat liberal and decent peoples as joint authors of the principles governing international society. This paper argues that the text, interpreted alongside Political Liberalism, supports a different reading: liberal peoples alone generate the Law through the international original position while decent peoples independently satisfy a threshold for decency, or basic legitimacy, and are accepted into the Society of Peoples on that basis, and at which point would accept the Law. This reading of the text dissolves a longstanding critique of Rawls’s international political theory, but reveals a deeper puzzle about the grounds of international legitimacy.

What are human rights, and why should they be protected? By whom? What explains the persistent gap between the rhetoric and reality of human rights enforcement? This course examines the politics of human rights from the humanitarian origins of the international system in the nineteenth century, through the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and to the present. It approaches human rights as both a moral aspiration and a political project, one with contested origins and an uncertain future. The course unfolds in two parts. The first part establishes the historical and theoretical foundations, engaging questions about the founding political moment, universalism versus cultural relativism, and the priority of rights. The second part contrasts these foundations with political reality: the catastrophic failures of the human rights system in the 1990s, the institutional responses they generated, and their limitations. The course offers a bifocal lens for thinking about human protection from above, through international criminal law, the Responsibility to Protect, and the Human Rights Council, and below, through transnational advocacy, norm change, and hybrid justice.