ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses attention on how the language of human rights entered into the discourse of international economic development in the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first centuries. It considers how respecting human rights may now function as an indicia of development, or a metric for assessing the viability of capital investment in a population. The chapter suggests, however, that Michel Foucault's writing may assist us in analyzing novel amalgamations of human rights and liberal governmentality as well. It hopes to supplement the groundwork laid by earlier histories in order to gesture towards novel genealogies of human rights that might be developed in the future. The chapter concludes with a suggestion that some techniques of modern international economic governance yoke both theories of human 'capital' to notions of human rights in complex, ambivalent and potentially promising ways.
