Concrete Utopia: Looking Backward Into the Future of Human Rights

Concrete Utopia 
conceptualizes the human rights project of the last two and a half centuries as a "backward-looking" endeavor, which, in order to move forward, must return to the utopian roots of its foundational documents. 

Human rights 
advance by judging the ills of 
the present world from a standpoint 
in the future where 
they 
might 
no longer exist--a fundamentally utopian gesture. 
This peculiar character of human rights makes them continually ripe for reinvention and for responding to changing world circumstances. 
Looking at topics such as the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s, public outrage to the Vietnam War, the US civil rights movement and the founding of Amnesty International in 1961, this book surveys the history of human rights and 
how they have been 
reconceived at different points in time. 
It closes by sketching 
the way they may 
be 
re-envisioned for new struggles 
in the 21st century.

At a time 
when 
the human rights project has endured criticism 
for being toothless or 
even 
for 
providing a pretext for military 
invasions, Kaleck argues that the current global crises, from inequality, to ecological collapse and the 
"age of pandemics," 
can be 
countered 
by 
reinventing 
human rights 
work 
through feminist, decolonial and ecological 
interventions.