Reconsidering realism on rights

Abstract

International Realism is widely interpreted as hostile to international human rights. Realist thinkers like Henry Kissinger, Kenneth Waltz, and Danilo Zolo are typically relied on in order to discredit attempts to defend and better institutionalize human rights. In fact, major classical Realists (e.g., E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr) cautiously defended emerging conceptions of international human rights. Their views overlao in revealing ways with contemporary Cosmopolitanism. Like many contemporary Cosmopolitans, they sympathized with ambitious models of global legal and political order. Despite this overlap, mid-century Realism can be employed to developed a sympathetic yet powerful critique of Cosmopolitanism, which sometimes closes its eyes to power inequality on the global scale and the many dilemmas raised by inequality for the attempt to achieve a normatively acceptable institutionalization of human rights.