Research on human rights protections showed steady improvement globally from the 1980s to early 2000s, when liberal rights norms and electoral democracy appeared ascendant and authoritarianism on the defensive.Footnote 1 While questions remain about how effective the human rights ecosystem is in practice, early scholarship emphasized the promise of international human rights, durability of liberal global governance, and the power of international pressure.Footnote 2 Today, the opposite appears true. Authoritarian states have moved beyond simply resisting international pressure and assumed a more assertive role, actively promoting alternative “human rights” discourses aligned with authoritarian rule and reshaping institutions and policies once designed to advance liberal ideals, with civil and political liberties most directly under threat.Footnote 3
We argue that authoritarian states are enjoying increasing influence over global human rights norms, a development that current United States (US) policy is exacerbating. Authoritarian skepticism of human rights is not new. What has changed is the enhanced capacity and willingness of autocracies to blunt external pressure and push back and reshape human rights, bolstered by mutual protection among like-minded regimes that lowers the status cost of systematic violations.Footnote 4 This dynamic is exacerbated by the sharp US retreat from its traditional leadership and support for human rights causes, and sometimes even outright hostility, under the second Trump administration, opting, in the words of one influential argument, for “exit from hegemony” in this issue area.Footnote 5 Such abdication amplifies authoritarian gains by removing funding, signaling, and institutional backing that once sustained international pressures to promote human rights, thereby weakening the fragile foundations that supported the broader internalization of human rights and democracy norms.
While the United States has always had a mixed and at times openly hostile record on human rights, what is distinctive about the current moment is the convergence of three trends: (1) authoritarian resurgence since around 2012, (2) the consolidation of an authoritarian community that shields, sustains, and legitimizes its members, and (3) a new phase in US human rights policy marked by retreat and disengagement. Together, these dynamics allow authoritarian repression, refutation, re-engineering, and replacement strategies to operate more effectively than in the past, making the present threat to human rights particularly concerning. We conclude that the future of global human rights cooperation looks bleak, though the best hope for redemption may lie in defending liberal democracy domestically, and for European and other consolidated democracies to sustain the movement in the absence of US leadership.
The Fragile Underpinnings of the Human Rights Order
Latent measures of human rights indicate notable global improvements since the 1980s, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s as democratization spread, international pressure to conform mounted, and liberal rights norms gained wider traction.Footnote 6 Scholars trace the normative foundation of human rights to prior periods and numerous norm entrepreneurs,Footnote 7 among them the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which helped weaken single-party rule in the Soviet bloc.Footnote 8 Influential theories of human rights change like the “boomerang”Footnote 9 and “spiral”Footnote 10 models highlighted how transnational activism and pressure, particularly from powerful liberal democracies such as the United States, combined with domestic mobilization could nudge states toward compliance by making violations costlier and rights commitments more attractive. Even illiberal states, according to some accounts, could be encouraged to commit to civil and political rights because of international socializing forces.Footnote 11
Still, norm internalization and implementation were uneven—strongest in liberal democracies and regions like Latin America, more limited in Africa and Southeast Asia—and rarely induced systematic change in entrenched autocracies; these are difficult targets, after all.Footnote 12 Even amid these gains, the period was marked by major atrocities.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, by the early 2000s, the diffusion, legalization, and institutionalization of liberal human rights norms appeared set to continue, but because much of this progress rested on activism, peer pressure, and external backing to sustain costs for violations, the system remained vulnerable if broader currents shifted.Footnote 14
Currents did indeed shift in the 2010s. Human rights norms became ensnared in a widening backlash against the liberal international order (LIO) that spread across many democracies, echoed long-standing criticisms from excluded states, and cast international institutions as responsible for economic and political failures.Footnote 15 Partially because of this backlash and in parallel, authoritarian politics resurged.Footnote 16 V-Dem’s global index of liberal democracy, for example, plateaued from around 1999 to 2012, before entering a period of sustained decline.Footnote 17 Important democratic states like Türkiye, India, and Hungary began backsliding while powerful authoritarian states like China and Russia embarked on severe and sustained domestic political crackdowns. By 2024, the average country-year liberal democracy score had fallen by around 10 percent, its lowest point in twenty-five years, with the “third wave of autocratization” “deepening and spreading.”Footnote 18 Powerful authoritarian states themselves are now enjoying newfound economic power and leverage when compared to their positions in the 1990s, strengthened by a growing authoritarian coalition.Footnote 19
The Authoritarian Challenge to Human Rights
Today, human rights norms are in peril. The fragile underpinnings of the international human rights system, global democratic regression, and autocracies’ economic power and cooperation all combine to position authoritarian states as more capable and willing to directly challenge the global human rights project in ways that they could not thirty years ago. With increased power in the international system, autocracies are insulating themselves from pressure and have become more aggressive in advancing their visions of human rights cooperation.
Building on previous research, we detect four main challenges that powerful authoritarian states mount against the international human rights system: (1) repression, (2) refutation, (3) re-engineering, and (4) replacement.Footnote 20 The first two challenges are primarily defensive strategies to limit the influence of human rights networks and institutions, thus insulating authoritarian states from scrutiny and accountability. The latter two challenges are offensive strategies to change collective understandings of human rights and modify the institutions that advance them. We present them as analytically distinct, but they co-occur and complement one another in practice. Consistent with previous research on normative preferences,Footnote 21 we suggest that civil and political liberties face the greatest threat. They are targeted directly by authoritarian efforts at repression and refutation, and downgraded through re-engineering and replacement in favor of concepts that enhance state power, such as the right to development.
Repression: Undermining Organizational Foundations of Transnational Human Rights Activism
Early scholarship underlined the importance of activism, spanning national and transnational efforts, in the diffusion of human rights norms. Since states could not be relied upon to enforce these norms on their own, activists had to pressure powerholders to commit and comply.Footnote 22 Its foundations lie in civil society, specifically nongovernment organizations (NGOs). Despite difficulties like issue selectivity,Footnote 23 financial competition and precarity,Footnote 24 and accountability deficits,Footnote 25 NGOs achieved notable successes.Footnote 26 They framed issues in human rights terms,Footnote 27 mobilized public support,Footnote 28 and lobbied for change.Footnote 29
Authoritarian states came to see these organizational foundations of human rights activism as threats to their power. Backlash followed, consistent with the finding from state repression literature that regimes respond to perceived threats with political repression.Footnote 30 Authoritarian responses to the “Color Revolutions” that challenged incumbents in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere in the post–Soviet space illustrate this dynamic.Footnote 31 Many authorities viewed NGOs as US-funded plots to undermine their power and took steps to insulate themselves against similar movements, consistent with authoritarian learning and diffusion theories.Footnote 32 Anti-NGO laws putting onerous restrictions, especially on foreign-linked organizations, spread across regions as states emulated neighbors and adopted “best practices” on suppressing dissent.Footnote 33
Repression of human rights activism also extended beyond borders. As recent research on transnational repression shows, authoritarian states increasingly target exiled critics abroad, even violently.Footnote 34 Between 2010 and 2019, about 36 percent of transnational repression cases targeted activists and 18 percent journalists—both crucial actors in the global human rights ecosystem.Footnote 35 Domestic repression appears to drive subsequent transnational repression, as governments chase down witnesses and activists abroad who may hold them accountable.Footnote 36 Some states even strike at the heart of the human rights system by targeting activists specifically for working with UN human rights bodies, complicating their operations and potentially compromising their outputs.Footnote 37
This broad crackdown erodes the organizational infrastructure of human rights advocacy. It severs ties between domestic and transnational actors, deters participation, limits access to resources, diverts and distracts organizations to focus on security or legal defense, and alters activists’ cost-benefit calculations.Footnote 38 As a result, the transnational space for human rights activism is notably more hostile today than it was a few decades ago. As the International Service for Human Rights notes in its 2022 report, “we are at an inflection point; a point at which the work of human rights defenders is perhaps more imperiled but more important than ever.”Footnote 39
Refuting: Destabilizing Information Sources; Undermining Challengers’ Reputations; Parrying Criticisms
Over time, autocracies have learned to manage the global information environment around human rights, reflecting a broader strategy of authoritarian image management.Footnote 40 A key tactic is to undermine the credibility of critics.Footnote 41 Political psychology research grounded in social identity theory and motivated reasoning shows that external human rights criticism can backfire, leading the public to dismiss it or even rally behind their government.Footnote 42 Authoritarian regimes exploit this tendency by discrediting human rights organizations (HROs) and other entities, portraying them as tools of nefarious Western actors.Footnote 43
Authoritarian states also spread selective information and mis- and disinformation about human rights, muddying the waters. “Whataboutism” is a central tactic for deflecting criticism, exemplified by North Korea’s typical response to human rights allegations, which involve denial and counteraccusations against the United States or Japan.Footnote 44 Similarly, following criticism over repression in Xinjiang, China launched a propaganda offensive to deny, obfuscate, and redirect accusations through state media and paid foreign social media influencers.Footnote 45 Though sometimes dismissed as state propaganda few see, evidence shows that authoritarian narratives have been reproduced in foreign media, reaching audiences in the guise of credible journalism.Footnote 46
Another tactic is to highlight achievements, substantive or hollow, in one area to distract from deficiencies in others. Recent research on “genderwashing” shows how states use ostensible progress on gender equality to parry criticisms of other rights deficits, giving the appearance of respecting democratic rights without genuine commitment.Footnote 47 Survey experiments suggest genderwashing can help autocracies appear democratic and rights-respecting.Footnote 48 Across all three information strategies—discrediting critics, “whataboutism,” and “washing”—restrictions on independent journalism limit the availability of reliable information to counter state-backed propaganda.Footnote 49 V-Dem data suggest that the environment for these tactics has become more permissive, with global freedom of expression and media censorship indices deteriorating sharply since 2014 and falling to their lowest levels since 1993 in 2024, consistent with RSF’s 2025 Press Freedom Index, which records an “unprecedented, critical low.”Footnote 50
Re-engineering: Co-opting Institutions to Prevent Scrutiny and Advance Pro-authoritarian Objectives
States use international organizations to advance national interests. But when regime security relies on violating civil and political rights, influencing global human rights institutions becomes existential. For this reason, authoritarian states have been especially active in corrupting international institutions to obscure or justify their own human rights records.Footnote 51 This ambition is not new, but relative to the 1990s and 2000s, autocracies’ increased economic power means they have new leverage to do so, and global shifts toward authoritarianism and populism mean that there is a bigger potential constituency for their proposals.
Autocracies have pursued several strategies to expand their influence over the United Nations (UN) human rights machinery. One is forming voting coalitions on human rights issues to contest norms and challenge liberal interpretations.Footnote 52 Research on UN voting and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) shows states cluster by normative preference, with autocracies often aligned in a “developmentalist” group preferring the state-led “right to development” over individual rights.Footnote 53 These coalitions of like-minded, largely nondemocratic states, can shield members from scrutiny, as occurred in 2019 when the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) sought to investigate China’s repression of its Uyghur minority.Footnote 54 Using Seabra and Mesquita’s UN General Assembly (UNGA) sponsorship data, we observe signs that re-engineering efforts bolstered by a strengthening authoritarian faction may be gaining traction, marked by a surge in nondemocratic sponsorship after 2016 and greater alignment among nondemocracies on resolutions backed by Russia or China.Footnote 55
Beyond strategic voting, autocracies manipulate UN human rights processes and their information pipelines to limit scrutiny and accountability. They block or restrict access to monitors or rapporteurs to hinder UN investigations, while targeting actors who share information with them, disrupting boomerang advocacy networks.Footnote 56 They are attempting to re-engineer the UN’s monitoring and rapporteur systems to be more consistent with authoritarian aims.Footnote 57 The UPR process, meant to spotlight every country’s human rights record, has been manipulated by flooding the speaking list with like-minded countries or pressuring others into silence.Footnote 58 China has led efforts to restrict genuine civil society input at the UN through procedural maneuvers that block NGO registration, filling the void with government-controlled groups like the China Society for Human Rights Studies that masquerade as independent advocates.Footnote 59
The re-engineering of international organizations for autocratic ends extends beyond the UN system. Dominant or aligned autocracies increasingly leverage regional organizations to solidify their rule and resist liberal norms, shaping international institutions to entrench autocratic governance.Footnote 60 If early research saw international organizations as tools for improving human rights and deepening democracy, it is now clear that authoritarian states have learned to use them to serve their interests and undermine the global human rights order.
Replacement: Promoting Alternative Human Rights Narratives
Beyond institutional re-engineering, authoritarian regimes, especially China and Russia, advance alternative human rights narratives that challenge established human rights ideas.Footnote 61 These efforts strategically reinterpret core human rights principles to deflect criticism and reshape their meaning, standards, and institutional purpose to be more aligned with their domestic governance models.Footnote 62 Norm entrepreneurs have long deployed these strategies, but what has changed is the newfound power, willingness, and collaboration of authoritarian states to advance a normative hierarchy of human rights that de-emphasizes civil and political rights in favor of state power.Footnote 63
One dominant narrative emphasizes state sovereignty and non-intervention. From this perspective, the universalism of human rights—particularly civil and political rights—is seen as infringing on sovereign equality and advancing “Western” interference.Footnote 64 China and Russia can use their powerful institutional position at the UN to invoke legal principles like territorial integrity, state consent, and non-aggression to block human rights resolutions perceived as threatening the interests of them and other authoritarian states.Footnote 65 Their 2016 joint declaration on international law formalized this stance, advocating an international legal order grounded in non-interference and sovereignty.Footnote 66
A second narrative prioritizes economic development over civil and political rights as part of a broader critique of liberal democracy.Footnote 67 These narratives invoke cultural relativism to reject first generation civil and political rights, emphasizing tradition, religion, and regional values, while promoting second-generation socioeconomic rights that do not threaten regime survival.Footnote 68 At the UNHRC, China has successfully reshaped resolution language to emphasize collective rights and the right to development, reflecting norm substitution and its agenda-setting role in shifting global norms away from individual liberties.Footnote 69 China’s economic success lends credence to these arguments in ways that were improbable in previous periods.Footnote 70
A third narrative elevates national security over human rights. Authoritarian states promote a global discourse that frames terrorism, extremism, and separatism—the “three evils”—as existential threats.Footnote 71 Through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, these threats have been codified as regional legal violations used to justify rights restrictions over international commitments and protect members of the autocratic club.Footnote 72 This reflects an intensified trend over the past twenty-five years, in which counterterrorism practices, particularly US-led efforts, weakened human rights norms and facilitated the global diffusion of antiterrorism laws, which authoritarian regimes have continually seized upon to suppress civil society and dissent.Footnote 73
Exacerbating the Authoritarian Threat: Making America Retreat Again
US retreat from human rights governance under the second Trump administration accelerates each of the four authoritarian challenges we identify. It exacerbates repression by depriving HROs of financial and institutional support necessary to withstand assaults by autocrats. It fuels autocracies’ refutation efforts by weakening the information environment on human rights and ceding rhetorical space to authoritarian actors, and even in some cases reinforces pro-authoritarian discourse that normalizes violations and discredits activists. It assists re-engineering by surrendering influence in international institutions to authoritarian actors, depriving liberal coalitions of a powerful leader. And it contributes to replacement by echoing some of the very same narratives advanced by autocracies. In each area, US abdication exacerbates the challenge and dims human rights prospects by removing funding, information sources, political support, and external pressure that bolstered the movement.
Of course, the United States frequently violates its own human rights rhetoric and commitments. Throughout its post–World War II history, it has supported authoritarian leaders abroad, invaded countries on false pretexts, and repressed minority groups at home, all while selectively participating in the international human rights regime.Footnote 74 Critics have long questioned the sincerity of US moral leadership on human rights. However, what is new is the depth and severity of this retreat.Footnote 75 Past hypocrisy coexisted with pressure, resources, and stewardship,Footnote 76 particularly in promoting civil and political rights, which gave HROs greater reach and impact.Footnote 77 Because international law is largely unenforceable, external pressure, especially from powerful states, can shift governments’ incentives by attaching material, political, or reputational consequences for their human rights practices.Footnote 78 While such efforts have had uneven success and the United States has played this role inconsistently, its funding, political backing, and institutional leverage nonetheless contributed legitimacy to the movement and raised the costs of violating liberal human rights norms. Without that pressure and support, liberal achievements, especially in civil and political rights, are now more vulnerable to reversal in the face of an increasingly aggressive authoritarian challenge.Footnote 79
The first Trump administration already signaled retrenchment, most visibly through withdrawal from the UNHRC after US efforts to reform its practices, including reducing authoritarian membership, were rebuffed.Footnote 80 Scholars noted that during Trump’s first term, US voting at the UNGA on Middle East issues diverged from traditional liberal allies, signaling growing norm fragmentation within the LIO.Footnote 81
However, the retreat in Trump’s second term has escalated quickly, proving more extreme and less restrained than the first.Footnote 82 The United States has cut UN funding, withdrawn from the UNHRC again, and taken even more drastic steps, including eliminating United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and foreign assistance programs.Footnote 83 These cuts have affected NGOs such as Freedom House, including initiatives to combat transnational repression and support dissidents from autocracies,Footnote 84 weakened the soft power of a liberal coalition that long used foreign aid to advance democratic values and civil society (albeit with mixed success),Footnote 85 and risk worsening human development in many parts of the world.Footnote 86 The State Department itself appears set to eliminate most of its human rights-focused work.Footnote 87 The United States has reportedly withdrawn from the UPR, becoming the first country to cease participation in the UN’s flagship human rights initiative, undermining its legitimacy and creating a precedent for other governments to withdraw or resist scrutiny.Footnote 88 It has also sanctioned UN human rights rapporteurs it disagrees with.Footnote 89
Another striking example is the 2025 State Department human rights reports, long regarded as a comprehensive global record of abuses and widely relied upon by Congress, HROs, courts, journalists, and academics.Footnote 90 Entire sections covering peaceful assembly, harassment of HROs, abuse against minorities, and other fundamental issues were removed, with remaining violations reduced to a single illustrative case. This curtailment of information shrinks the evidentiary baseline on rights abuses, making it easier for repressive regimes to deflect or deny criticism. In addition, reports on allies of the Trump administration, including El Salvador, Hungary, and Saudi Arabia, were flagged for political review before publication, raising concerns about selective reporting that could shield repressive governments from scrutiny. While earlier scholarship documented bias in US reporting, this combination of underreporting, targeted omissions, and explicit political vetting marks a more serious departure.Footnote 91
Together, these actions strip away external backing and pressures that once slowed down the authoritarian advance, reopening space for growing authoritarian influence to expand unchecked.Footnote 92 While earlier scholarship assumed a degree of continued US leadership on human rights, other work predicted that great powers may challenge the very norms and organizations they helped build once they no longer served their domestic interests.Footnote 93 In the United States, Republican elites have driven a civilizational rhetoric that portrays human rights promotion abroad and engagement in multilateral institutions as incompatible with national self-interest.Footnote 94 Declining support for global human rights governance within liberal democracies, alongside autocratic hardening elsewhere, threatens the future of international cooperation and normative commitment, weakens intergovernmental institutions, and heightens the risk of deteriorating human rights conditions worldwide.Footnote 95
Conclusion: The Future of International Human Rights
This analysis suggests a challenging future for human rights. If current trends continue, the global landscape will be characterized by hostility toward transnational human rights activism and an absence of US protection. Authoritarian information strategies will erode the credibility of human rights actors and mislead global publics. Institutional capture will further shield autocracies from scrutiny and serve as a foundation to legitimize and promote illiberal “human rights.” If powerful authoritarian states consolidate these gains and continue advancing alternative human rights narratives, they may emerge as models for others, attract new followers, and replace liberal human rights as a global project. Recent warning signs of how empowered autocracies are seizing the moment to reshape the global order include the joint appearance of the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea in 2025 for the first time since the 1950s.Footnote 96
Where might sources of resilience be found? The most impactful may lie in concerted domestic pushback against the illiberal tide within democracies themselves. Illiberal movements like those led by Trump, Modi, and European populist parties are not predestined to win future elections or turn their countries into dictatorships; democracy is surprisingly resilient but benefits from a friendly international environment.Footnote 97 European and other consolidated democracies, themselves facing domestic difficulties, may need to play a greater role in sustaining that environment in the absence of US leadership. Paradoxically the international human rights movement may need to focus its resources on liberal democracies to shore up defenses against authoritarian advances. When conditions shift, it will be better positioned to expand once again.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Samuel Brazys, Michael Goodhart, William Spaniel, Ben Tonra, the editors of International Organization, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. ChatGPT (OpenAI, GPT-5, accessed September 2025) was used to assist with grammar and language checks for readability. All content, including substantive ideas, arguments, analyses, and conclusions are our own.
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