This chapter examines the intended and unintended consequences of American hierarchy on partner states. It analyzes the impact of increased state capacity resulting from American economic hierarchy on civil conflict, human rights, democratization, and inequality. The results suggest that economic hierarchy reduces conflict, human rights abuses, and promotes democracy primarily through direct effects rather than via increased state capacity. However, both economic and security hierarchy exacerbate political inequalities. The chapter highlights the complex implications of American hierarchy.

The year 2021 saw record violent dispossessions of Indigenous Peoples across Paraguay. Once heralded as an early adopter of Indigenous land rights and legal protections, Paraguay is now a site of contentious land politics that have garnered international attention and litigation. In this chapter, we draw from over forty years of collective experience working on and researching Indigenous land rights in Paraguay – from litigation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to ongoing advocacy with communities – and we trace the major legal achievements and document the ways that land rights have been challenged and threatened. We advance a theory of “pendulum policies” for land rights to trace the shifts in state-Indigenous relations, manifesting today as an implementation gap where de jure land rights are typically undermined in practice by state and private interests. In this chapter, we show how the role of international law and strategic litigations have pushed the pendulum from violations towards justice, yet we remain cognizant of the threats, from land renting to direct violence, which push the pendulum back towards violations. This chapter provides readers with a clear overview of Indigenous land rights in Paraguay, and offers recommendations for pushing the pendulum towards land justice over the next decade.

Following NATO’s military intervention and a very wide-ranging UN peacekeeping mission, Kosovo is today the site of the largest civilian mission of the European Union. In the aftermath of the armed conflict of 1998–9 which was fought along ethnic lines and led to mass atrocities and to the destruction of more than half of the available housing stock, the UN set up a quasi-judicial, administrative mechanism to “resolve” property issues, which was called the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA). Staffed predominantly by Kosovo Albanian national legal professionals and a few international jurists, the KPA was entrusted to deal with war-related property claims submitted overwhelmingly by Kosovo Serbs. Relatively powerless and underfunded, the KPA is a paradigmatic example of a contemporary transitional justice mechanism that is understood as a short-term, bridging, technical-legal project rather than a national process of righting past wrongs. Under the increasing neoliberal managerialism of rule of law as a tool of good governance, the KPA was organized as a mass claims procedure. To “streamline” the process and allow for the “quick” and “efficient” resolution of claims, it used data-processing technologies, and decisions were issued in batches of claims of similar legal scenarios. This chapter conceptualizes the work of the KPA as “law-washing” within the post-cold war juristocratic phase of international intervention and international law more generally. The chapter understands juristocracy in a broad sense, as a diffuse and transhistorical moment in which law is used in often fetishistic, instrumental ways to tackle a range of social and political issues previously not conceived as legal issues. Engaging with law’s “dialectics of reckoning” means analytically making sense of moments (that we may choose to call “juristocratic”) of simultaneous hope in law’s potential to propel the currents of social justice and cynicism and disenchantment about law’s incapacity to “solve” issues beyond law (if at all).

Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

This chapter expands on a series of recent interventions about the consequences of the unraveling of juristocracy at a more diffuse transnational level: consequences for critical scholarship (both disciplinary and interdisciplinary), for the state of (mostly Euro-American) progressive politics, and for the urgent project to imagine alternatives to rights-based frameworks for change and justice-seeking that guard against the use of violence, ethnocentrism, and other expressions of an exclusionary juristocratic reckoning. The chapter begins by summarizing the well-known intellectual historical narrative of notable developments in the wake of the “endtimes” (Hopgood 2013) of human rights and other categories of law that were invested with the weight of social, political, and, to a lesser extent, economic transformation. After focusing on and tracing the afterlives of existing human rights up to the present, the chapter then introduces an alternative vision for what is described as the “future lives” of human rights, a proposition that recognizes the force of the different critiques underlining the profound turn away from human rights in the present, but which nevertheless seeks to go beyond these critiques. Although the original argument for “reinventing human rights” (Goodale 2022) was meant to examine fairly comprehensively the ways in which a radically reformulated account of human rights was still possible, an account, moreover, that might yet prove capable of galvanizing new and more sustainable forms of translocal social and political action, the 2022 intervention nevertheless left certain key concepts rather underdeveloped. As a response, the chapter returns to these key concepts in order to thicken the presentation of a reinvented human rights as a framework for multiscalar social mobilization and justice-seeking. Yet as the chapter emphasizes, this framework does not return “human rights” to its grounding in law – national, regional, or international. In this sense, the proposition builds on the transformative potential of the turn away from certain kinds of law. As the chapter concludes, the case for detaching human rights – conceptually and institutionally – from law seems as compelling as ever, perhaps even more so in light of the violent impotence of the international system writ large in the face of recent crises such as the global COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

1. What does the term ‘healing journey’ mean to you? 2. In what ways do you currently feel social work is both a gift and a burden? 3. What lessons does Gloria’s story teach us about who is responsible for what? 4. What is the difference for you (if any) between disability and dis Ability?

1. How can de facto social work be supported in the fight for human rights? 2. As the author writes in this story, working in conflict areas might be dangerous. Think of how social workers can help to secure people in situations where they are threatened because of their engagement or political opinions. How do you think social workers can become a part of changing the everyday life of people in these situations? 3. In what way can de facto social work lead to collaborative support from a community in danger?

This chapter considers the role courts play in protecting fundamental rights. It addresses three questions. What role do domestic courts play in the protection of rights in different constitutional settings? In examining key elements of constitutional design, the chapter show how there are significant variations in how courts protect rights across the world. Secondly, what role should courts play in the adjudication of rights? Here it is argued that courts in their ordinary work, applying legislation and the common law, do and must protect rights. With regard to the more contested question whether courts should protect rights under a constitutional bill of rights, the chapter argues that the case for such a role for courts is at its strongest in certain circumstances but that it cannot be claimed that in all circumstances courts should be conferred with this power. Finally, the chapter considers the current debates in the United Kingdom concerning a possible repeal of the Human Rights Act, and withdrawal from the European Convention of Human Rights, and expresses dismay at the prospect of the repeal of the Human Rights Act, given how elegantly that Act combines protection for rights by UK courts with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.