Human Rights

Human rights leadership in the twenty-first century is developing in the midst of worldwide debate about which institutions should predominate globally in the governance of human organizations. Innumerable actors are involved in these interrelationships—national, subnational, and transnational—representing widely varied views. These actors also have widely varied capacities and commitments regarding the exercise of personal example, peaceful persuasion, manipulation, coercion, or even overwhelming violence toward those people appearing to oppose them.

In significant ways, current conditions for human rights leadership are similar to those in which the human rights movement first greatly expanded at the end of World War II. Widespread horror at recent spectacles of mass human suffering and organized cruelty led many people then, as now, to determine that all humans deserve the rights of freedom, dignity, and safety because they are human and that these rights must be asserted around the world. Too many people had seen with their own eyes or learned in the media about events so terrible that they felt that no human being should ever again be treated like that. More world leaders were concluding also that if there is to be hope in this increasingly interdependent world for long-term humane conditions of life for people anywhere, there must be worldwide-agreed goals, standards, institutions, and enforcement for how all people must be treated. Influential people were beginning to believe that for there to be peace in the world, the world must build human rights.

After World War II, however, many leaders also were deciding that modern technology provides so much danger of extreme damage to whole populations and their protective governing structures, from sudden attacks by armed aggressors, that new structures and methods for national, regional, and worldwide security must be developed to prevent and defend against such attacks. National security structures developed during World War II were expanded, and even the United States and other democracies substantially increased secret government information and activity that ordinary citizens were not allowed to know. Within the new world security structure, the United Nations Security Council, measures were backed selectively by leaders of the five major powers and nonpermanent members according to the individual national security needs they perceived in differing situations as they lined up [Page 680]on the two major sides or attempted to stay neutral during the “Cold War,” which lasted until nearly the twentieth century's end.

Some of the most important security goals during the Cold War and since, such as the prevention of nuclear war, have coincided with the goals of human rights leaders. Some of the most important human rights goals, such as the prevention of genocide, in most specific cases have been assessed by national security leaders as not sufficiently important to their own nation's security to be worth spending the political, economic, military, and human assets to prevent. This was true for twentieth-century genocides in Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, and other countries.

By the twentieth century's end, however, political leaders had begun more publicly expressing regret after failing to counter ongoing genocide. U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, in leading military interventions, in, respectively, Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003), justified those actions to some extent in regional security terms, citing the countering of genocide as a grave, related matter. Governmental and nongovernmental political and human rights leaders do not yet agree on what scale of human rights atrocities within a sovereign state justifies outside military intervention. Some observers at the time believed the United States to have less-principled reasons for the Kosovo and Iraq interventions. Other observers believed that less-principled reasons in other world capitals helped explain why U.S.-led military intervention in those cases received less than the clearest U.N. authorization. During the twenty-first century's first decade, to be sure, struggles for influence among national, subnational, and transnational structures are more complex than during the two-sided Cold War, although U.S. leaders are backed by more force than much of the rest of the world combined. Furthering the complexity, increasing technological capacity has enabled fewer individuals to cause more suffering and damage, creating more terror on behalf of whatever cause, with smaller weapons of “ordinary” and mass destruction. Transnational and small groups now more easily can cause massive damage to human rights and national security in the same blows.

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