This introduction presents the main arguments of the book, develops a novel terminological framework, and situates the book in current research. First, from the perspective of international economic and social human rights, this is not an age of human rights triumphalism. The main human rights advocates featured in this book were concerned with international justice and redistributive justice, and theirs was a long quest to lift international economic and social human rights onto a level-playing field through three phases: internationalizing rights, criticizing global inequalities through rights, and attempting to secure the legitimacy of these rights once and for all. Second, on a broader egalitarian plateau, human rights advocacy can be situated on a redistributionist terrain. Third, this book supplements institutional, organizational, diplomatic, political, and movement-centered research on international human rights. There is a gap in existing scholarship in understanding historical interrelations between human rights and inequalities, which is where this book intervenes, above all from an intellectual historical perspective.

Murakami Wood makes both an empirical and a theoretical contribution by analysing the discourses contained in smart city marketing materials to create a detailed description of the kind of human that smart city developers and promoters envision as smart city residents. The resulting portrait of the “platform human” – a being whose entrepreneurial and libertarian needs are seamlessly enabled by technology built into the lived environment – is informed by a technologically-enabled notion of class, a particular and specific political identity of smart citizens as property-owning, entrepreneurial, and libertarian, and a generic environmental ‘goodness’ associated with smart platforms. The combination of these three elements resonates strongly with transhumanist speciation where humans are imagined as data-driven, surveillant, and robotic.

The chapter offers an ethnographic study of a court trial of a former judge of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, who was accused of lying in his lustration statement about his past links with communist secret services. Through an observation of the court proceedings, analysis of the court file, and life history interviews with the judge, the chapter engages the questions of violence, guilt, and responsibility. In particular, the chapter focuses attention on the notion of “communist guilt” and the subjective effects of public shaming, and highlights the ways in which lustration articulates the entangled problems about socialist-era state violence and neoliberal capitalist violence, around which rightwing populist groups mobilize. In conversation with the work of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt, among others, the chapter suggests a notion of political responsibility to address this entanglement and thinks past the narrowly construed, individualized, guilt-driven understanding of moral and legal responsibility.

In this chapter we explore the central features of liberalism as they relate to issues of international security and how liberalism believes states can work together to achieve security. First, we examine the historical evolution of liberalism generally before going on to dissect the central features of liberalism related to security. For unlike realism, liberalism holds that the world need not be a place of continuous violent conflict; the international system can change, humanity can better itself. That said, realism and liberalism share many of the same assumptions about international relations and international security. This chapter concludes with a look at how liberalism manifests itself in international security policy.

This chapter traces the transformation of Christian Democratic attitudes toward the Chilean military regime. Whereas the two Christian Democratic parties in the FRG defended the military coup in 1973, by 1975 the CDU had turned against the Pinochet because of three interrelated reasons. First, CDU politicians feared that left-wing solidarity activists were using Chile to monopolize the topic of human rights in the FRG. Second, the international movement against the Pinochet regime and the latter’s international isolation forced the CDU to take a more critical stance. Finally, the Pinochet regime repressed Chile’s Christian Democratic Party (PDC), a close collaborator of the CDU and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation since the 1960s. The CSU, however, welcomed the Pinochet regime’s neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy and rejected the Keynesian PDC. Despite these differences, there was also convergence. The CDU consistently criticized the asylum program for refugees from Chile, largely accepted Pinochet’s neoliberal experiment, ignored abuses elsewhere in Latin America, and moved towards normalizing relations with the Pinochet regime by the late 1970s.

The epilogue explains West German engagement with Latin American politics from 1988 to 1992, restates the historiographical contributions of the book, and briefly examines the trajectory of market-friendly and market-critical human rights from the 1990s into the 2000s. Christian Democratic officials encouraged market-friendly democratization in Latin America by supporting the electoral ouster of the Sandinistas in 1990, and providing development aid packages to El Salvador despite continued abuses and rampant corruption. Alongside the collapse of state socialism in East Central Europe, democratization in Latin America helped enthrone market-friendly human rights into German reason of state. But the market-friendly conditionality principle instituted in 1991 has selectively targeted some states, such as Cuba, while ignoring abuses in countries important to German economic development. Market-critical human rights activism endured by establishing links with left-wing parties in Germany and with the transnational anti-globalization movement. But the propensity of some of its adherents to support authoritarian states makes it an easy target for market-friendly advocates. However, market-critical human rights can be a helpful corrective to an international human rights system that has largely eschewed criticism of inequality since the 1990s.

Limited research has been devoted to investigating assumptions about competition dynamics established through a neoliberal lens. Advocates argue that competition fosters innovation and benefits consumers by incentivizing private enterprises to develop better products or services at competitive prices compared to their rivals. Critics argue that competition exacerbates inequality by disproportionately rewarding high achievers. Rewarding high achievers reflects the meritocratic aspect of competition, which has been widely assumed to be rooted in the individualistic culture of Western countries. Contrary to this assumption, the ideology of meritocratic competition thrived in ancient collectivist Asian countries. Moreover, the assumed linear relationship between individualism, competition, and inequality is contradicted by economic literature, which suggests more individualistic nations display lower income inequality. Despite extensive economic and cultural examination of competition, competition’s political dimensions remain understudied. This interdisciplinary book challenges conventional assumptions about competition, synthesizing evidence across economics, culture, and politics.

This chapter maps out the trajectory of British postmodern fiction in three specific phases: a gradual emergence characterised by slowly increasing textual experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s; a second phase notable for a high level of fictional critique of the political and economic order in the 1980s and 1990s; and a third period in the early twenty-first century, by which point both the techniques and ideas associated with postmodern literature had become so commonplace that they could no longer be considered critically oppositional. In identifying these phases, the chapter departs from Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that postmodernism embodies the cultural logic of late capitalism and is therefore completely unable to generate any effective criticism of the dominant ideology of global capitalist societies and shows that at its height British postmodern fiction constituted a genuinely critical form of writing with regard to that ideology.

The chapter focuses on how Chile’s conservatives rallied in opposition to the country’s popular mobilization of the 1960s. At its center is a group of authoritarian thinkers named the “Gremialistas.” Buoyed by the ICH and Opus Dei apparatuses, this group was responsible for devising an ideology akin to that of technocratic Spain and, subsequently, stood at the forefront of the opposition to Salvador Allende’s government. In turn, it served as the ideological backbone of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, thereby defining its neoliberal economic model and constitutional frameworks.

Chapter 6 explores how the business of speechwriting is necessarily caught up in the commodity chains of the market, and the ways in which status competition permeates high-end language work – including academia. After a brief section which summarizes the preceding chapters, Mapes identifies three overarching problems which her book helps to illuminate. These pertain to 1) political economy, field, and the marketplace; 2) folk linguistics; and 3) community-centered collaboration and consultation. As a means of further interrogating these specific issues, Mapes briefly analyzes data from her participation in a two-day Speechwriter Organization conference. Focusing on the ways in which practitioners both claim and contest their community membership, she identifies moments of solidarity building, and moments of individual status production. Across these two sections Mapes highlights speechwriters’ paradoxical struggle for legitimacy. They want their work to be acknowledged and valued, and yet it is only by operating and competing within the particular confines of their “field” (Bourdieu 2005 [2000]) that they can accumulate capital. Hence, in both avowing and disavowing ownership, power, and prestige, speechwriters demonstrate the real complexity of professionalized language work under neoliberal conditions.