ABSTRACT
Increasing carnage and numbers of refugees due to civil war, terrorist suicide attacks, political violence and mass misery draw more attention to world leaders. The universal belief and normative norm of human rights are interwoven with peace. Eminent human rights experts such as Haas, Forsythe, Donnelly, Kallen , Richmond, Bell, Ledwith, Ife and Tesoriero and McWilliams engage in a consistent and holistic debate on human rights as a core value of peace and indicators for benchmarking and measuring peaceful societies and rule of law. Reconsidering Critical Theory in relation to human rights, Horkheimer makes a critique of liberalism in the dialectic of enlightenment. His criticism puts emphasis on the modern philosophical and legal subject as abstract, detached and ahistorical, while Theodor Adorno develops an empirical investigation into the authoritarian and democratic personalities and antidemocratic character traits. The concept of human rights is arguably one of the key principles of neoliberal policy agendas for peace.
