“Generations on Generations of Human Rights” by M. Christian Green

New York City Skyline by Janusz Sobolewski (CC BY 2.0).

Recently, a number of us on staff at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, ranging from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, had the occasion to take stock of different generations and their perspectives on human rights. Baby Boomers are old enough to have parents who fought the great battles against Nazism, fascism, and the Holocaust in World War II, the very incidents which gave rise to the establishment of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the great international human rights covenants of the 1960s on civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights. My own Generation X cohort came of age in the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s, when the toppling of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc governments was predicted to prompt a “peace dividend,” with some proclaiming the triumph of liberalism, and “end to history,” and a smooth path to an emerging path of technology and globalization. But the peace was shattered by brutal religious and ethnically infused genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Then, the rise of interconnected economies and banking led to global economic downturns in 1998 and 2001. The peace dividend was not bearing the expected fruit, to the detriment of human rights around the world.

My millennial colleagues came of age a decade later, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and Washington, D.C., and the Global War on Terror that followed. In legal studies, there was new attention to the law of war, humanitarian law, and nation-building, as the United States and its coalition attempted to democratically reconstruct Iraq and Afghanistan over the next two decades. In religious studies, there were new attempts at the study of comparative religion, perhaps to better understand those who might do us harm in the name of religion. Generation Z has now begun to populate the halls of law schools and seminaries– a generation crucially shaped by the COVID pandemic and the technological innovations of Zoom rooms, cryptocurrencies, and huge innovations in artificial intelligence (AI). Some of these technological innovations have brought people together in new and productive ways, including political organizing and advocacy for human rights and other social goods and political objectives. But others seem to be contributing to greater economic inequality, and potentially the upending of economies by reducing the need for human labor and jobs. Amidst all these large forces, from global terrorism, to global epidemics, to the global reach of AI and algorithms, both human roles and human rights seem under siege.

Critiques of Human Rights

Even as human rights challenges continue to plague the contemporary world, the modern, liberal human rights regime has come under criticism in recent decades. In his 2010 book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, legal historian Samuel Moyn proposed modern human rights were the “last utopia,” but far from unique aspirations in Western history and argued instead that “human rights are best understood as survivors: the god that did not fail while other political ideologies did.” In 2014, law scholar Eric Posner published The Twilight of Human Rights Law, which promised a similarly grim analysis of the field. Therein, Posner begins with the proposition that “human rights laws have failed to accomplish their objectives” and, more ominously, that “there is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the well-being of people, or even resulted in respect for the rights in those treaties.” 

In 2015, international relations scholar Stephen Hopgood published The Endtimes of Human Rights, in which he argued, “Universal human rights once served a very specific historical purpose: to inspire a sense of secular sacred among the new middle classes of a rapidly modernizing Europe.” In that capacity, it was an “antidote to a troubling contradiction, the coexistence of progress with intensifying violence, vast social and economic inequality, and fears of “the disenchantment of the world.’” Since that time, Hopgood has argued:

Not only has that historical purpose become defunct, but the institutions that were created to perform it now function as self-perpetuating global structures of intermittent power that mask their lack of democratic authority and systematic ineffectiveness. The best they may occasionally do, and it is often a lot even if wholly inadequate to the task, is provide relief in cases of extreme distress. Much of that remains a mixture of false hope and unaccountable intervention. They survive as part of a grand narrative that gives an ideological alibi to a global system whose governance structures sustain persistent unfairness and blatant injustice. 

Suffice it to say that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the idea of human rights seemed to be under siege in law and related fields of political theory and international relations.

Within the field of religious studies, new critiques had also emerged concerning religious freedom as a human right. In the eponymous volume that emerged from their Politics of Religious Freedom project, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, with two dozen contributors, raised important questions about the nature and origins of the concept of religious freedom, the cultural and epistemological questions that underlie it, and the politics and results to which it gives rise. In both religion and law, new concerns for identity and recognition, both of individuals and groups, and the intersectionality of these with various rights and human rights began to shape the field. As political tides began to turn again in the United States, additional concerns for borders and boundaries and the relationship of these to citizenship, foreignness, discrimination, and deprivation of right becomes ascendant and were captured by Hurd and Sullivan again in At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion, whose contents were also visited in one of our Canopy Forum essay series.

Generations of Human Rights: The Classic Three

I recently had the opportunity to discuss some of these perspectives in a webinar convened by the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Human Rights Program Unit. It was a chance to take stock of where we are today when it comes to human rights and their relation to religion. For much as different generations of law and religion scholars have emerged in different human rights contexts, these evolving contexts have given rise to new generations of human rights. 

The idea of “generations” of human rights emerged from a key article by the French jurist, human rights scholar, and UNESCO legal advisor Karel Vasak, who distinguished between a “first generation” of civil and political rights and a “second generation” of economic, social and cultural rights, much as the United Nations had in its international covenants. The article also pointed to a “third generation” of collective and solidarity rights to things like development, peace, and a healthy environment that no individual or state can achieve without the cooperation of others. Vasak’s three generations of rights were said to be based on the French Revolutionary values of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. 

The three generations categorization has not been without criticism. Theorists of rights have criticized the apparent hierarchies of, say, civil and political rights over economic, social and cultural rights. They have criticized framings of civil and political rights as “negative rights” and economic, social, and cultural rights as “positive rights.” Does the right to vote, for example, to take a consummate civil and political right really benefit (or even exist) without a state’s positive provision of the infrastructure of voting, and protection of fair and equal opportunities to exercise the right to vote? And don’t both first and second generation rights require attention not only to both collective and solidaristic values and also to group identities, particularly the need to protect the rights of minorities in order to avoid a ruthlessly majoritarian collectivity?

The boundaries between the classic three generations of rights are porous, not airtight. They are products of history and the prevailing cultures and times in which they originated. The French Revolution was certainly a key snapshot moment in the development of rights, especially in France, Europe, and America. The Cold War was another moment of crystallization, with the United States and then Soviet Union then differentiating themselves and their political systems around different generations of rights. The U.S. famously trumpeted civil and political rights that were compatible with its capitalist, market-based economy. The Soviet Union, from Marxist and Communist principles, claimed superiority for its supposedly equal provision of economic, social, and cultural rights that coexisted with political repression to the extent they were realized at all, but also helped make Marxism compelling for nations in the Global South seeking new post-independence political systems to replace colonial regimes in ways that also enhanced Soviet geopolitical objectives. The third generation of solidaristic rights has been developing for decades with the rise of postcolonialism and the need for development in the Global South, with the concern to bring peace to after the “peace dividend” gave way to genocide, with the increased attention to environmentalism and the problem of climate change that many had postulated and science now proves, and with the rising identitarianism of the early twenty-first century that has brought new attention to group rights and the status of minorities. Third generation human rights have, in recent decades, been importantly developed in connection with the rights of Indigenous peoples and sexual orientation and gender identity rights (SOGI) rights.

New Generations of Human Rights

To the existing three generations of human rights have been added new generations, reflecting the emerging concerns of our time. A fourth generation of human rights has been defined as including bioethical rights, digital rights, and even epistemic (or knowledge) rights. The focus for bioethical rights encompasses particularly biotechnical concerns that have emerged with potentials for human enhancement and transhumanism, and the questions of dignity and equality that these raise. What kind of world is created when some—particularly the wealthy—have the ability to improve themselves and transcend human limitations? Closely related are issues of digital rights, including the privacy rights and data rights (or the related “right to be forgotten”), and the storage of, dissemination of, and intellectual or other property rights about ourselves and others? Related are questions of epistemic rights and the right to know and access information—particularly digital information—that is often unequally divided between the world’s haves and have nots. The right to know can, after all, be conceived as the corollary of the right to expression, since the value of the expression lies not only in expression, but in the capacity of others to receive it. What systems need to be in place to guarantee epistemic rights in a world still divided by inequality?

Indeed, some have begun to envision a fifth generation of human rights that blends and extends the third and fourth generations. These build on third generation solidaristic rights and existing not only between humans, but between humans and non-human creatures, rights of nature, and responsibilities toward future generations of both human and natural entities. These rights are, thus, interspecies rights and intergenerational rights. They build on fourth generation biotechnical and privacy rights to include not only concerns for data access and privacy, but also, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) the potential interrelatedness and collaboration of humanity and AI. Further, this fifth generation, like the fourth, is not entirely separate from first- and second-generation rights. The success or failure of these fourth and fifth generation rights is very dependent on our ability to engage in civil and political discourse about their scope, limits, and ethical use. It is likewise conditioned on the potential for these generations of rights to be extended to all economic, social, and cultural groups.

Finally, it should be noted that all of these generations of rights have deep connections to religious notions of humanity and dignity, which is not surprising, given the modern human rights system’s origins in the human tragedy of the Shoah. The world’s religions all have important things to say about these various generations of rights, which while not airtight but overlapping, have so many implications for humanity and our future. It is said that there are six human generations in the world today. Will there be a sixth generation of human rights? Might it be a religious and spiritual generation? ♦

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Recommended Citation

Green, M. Christian. “Generations on Generations of Human Rights.” Canopy Forum, January 15, 2025. https://canopyforum.org/2026/01/16/generations-on-generations-of-human-rights/.

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