ABSTRACT
The major contribution of the Third World to the human rights discussion has been to introduce a focus on collective rights. The immediate post-war environment saw still further setbacks for the human rights movement. It transformed the domestic circumstances of the moment and it certainly changed the international environment, but it did not reverse the decades of economic, social structural, institutional and ideological transformations that allowed the movement to emerge in the first place. In a period of austerity, human rights issues had one unusual advantage: they were cheap, issues which could be addressed, it seemed, on a budget. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War of 1990–91 created a new environment less favorable to human rights. The experience in the Arab world suggests a degree of caution in conventional evaluations of political liberalization that measure democratization primarily by the growth in participatory institutions without paying sufficient attention to the necessarily concomitant decline in authoritarian ones.
