Neoliberalism, Legalism and Human Rights in Medium-sized International Nongovernmental Organizations

In recent decades, leading international human rights organizations have adopted a neoliberal approach consistent with the interests of the organizations’ primary funders (including private foundations). Organizations have advanced claims within a legalistic framework—centering individual rights against state actors or vindicating other claims recognizable by the international criminal justice framework rather than advocating for more radically democratic social and economic transformations that would challenge existing national and transnational power structures. In this chapter, I invoke principles of critical management studies to assess the neoliberal, legalistic approach reflected in how four mid-sized international organizations define human rights. I examine this circumscribed notion of human rights and argue that such organizations should move away from legalism and toward a more demanding conception of human rights. Organizations that do so may risk alienating some funders and other partners, but this is a risk worth taking to vindicate the promise of human rights principles.