What if Neoliberalism Captures the Human Rights Establishment? Sustainable Development Goal 4 and the Global Education Reform Movement

Excerpt

Jamie Mayerfeld’s The Promise of Human Rights is an important and profound call for countries to participate in an international human rights legal order. We share many of the same enemies, including American exceptionalists who think that political realism and the principle of sovereignty justify committing atrocities to other countries and people. My heart thrills when I read his account of the guiding thought of human rights: “each person is a moral center whose perspective matters and whose interests must be accorded significant weight and respect” (Mayerfeld 2016, 19). When reading his book, I think of the picture of Eleanor Roosevelt holding in her outstretched arms a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and I remember why people around the globe look to the United Nations and other international human rights organizations for relief from oppression. At the same time, I think that Mayerfeld overlooks the possibility—nay, the reality—that the ultrarich have used the language and institutions of human rights to justify the global expansion of neoliberalism. To illustrate this point, I discuss how Sustainable Development Goal 4 advances the Global Education Reform Movement. Mayerfeld thinks that James Madison’s lesson to the present is to entrust human rights governance to an impartial judge; my argument is that there is no such judge, and the Global Education Reform Movement prompts democrats to work to disperse educational authority. …