Voorbij de laatste utopie: Over de historiografie van mensenrechten.

<bold><italic>Beyond the Last Utopia. About the historiography of human rights</italic></bold> Human rights is a highly contested concept in both current public debates and recent historiography. In this review essay the historiographical debate about human rights, in particular invoked by Samuel Moyn’s <italic>Last Utopia</italic> (2010), is analysed by discussing three recent monographs: Mark Bradley’s <italic>The World Reimagined</italic> (2016), Steven L.B. Jensen’s <italic>The Making of International Human Rights</italic> (2016), and Marco Duranti’s <italic>The Conservative Human Rights Revolution</italic> (2017). Although these books offer valuable insights into the much- debated ‘global breakthrough’ and chronology of human rights, their main contribution has to be located elsewhere: in ‘provincializing’ the foreign policy of the United States (Bradley), in pointing to unknown but influential actors and issues in the history of the United Nations (Jensen), and in providing a new perspective on the early days of European integration (Duranti). Based on this analysis, it is argued that human rights and their chronology should no longer be considered as a historiographical field in isolation, but that human rights must be investigated as part of broader political ideologies and practices, as a tool of marginalized countries and groups, and as a concept that enables historians better to understand relations between developments at the local and translocal level, and domestic and foreign policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]