The Demise of the Global Human Rights Sector — A Tragedy Foretold
About ten years ago, a prominent British academic, Stephen Hopgood, wrote that the human rights movement was in its “end times,” chiefly because it had allied itself too closely with the ideas and politics of Western powers.
The real end times arrived in 2025, however, with the collapse of the global human rights funding model. Once the US government under Donald Trump eliminated most forms of foreign aid, European governments followed suit, shifting their funds from aid to defense.
In the early 1990s, thousands of NGOs popped up to promote human rights. The problem, however, was that the bulk of their funding came from European and North American donors, either directly, through bilateral aid agencies such as USAID, or indirectly, through UN agencies and international charities.
Most of that money has now dried up, and the sector is dying as we speak.
My colleagues and I have been tracking the political economy of the global human rights movement for years. We began with a warning about NGO over-dependence on foreign aid in 2015, in an article published in the Review of International Political Economy. We continued to sound the alarm in a series of publications that relied on both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Human rights principles were reasonably popular, we wrote, based on evidence we collected from opinion surveys around the world. It was the funding that was the problem, not the ideas.
To learn more about our research and why we feared that this year’s collapse was more than likely, check out this short blog post, which I wrote today, or a second version, which I posted here.
It succinctly lays out the relevant research and discusses the potential for reinventing the human rights movement as something quite different.
“Follow the money,” the adage goes. Funding patterns matter for countries, corporations, and individuals, and the same is true for NGOs, no matter how devoted they are to promoting good ideals.
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About James Ron
James Ron is an international research consultant who taught for 22 years in higher education in Canada, Mexico, and the US. Before that, he was a consultant for Human Rights Watch and other international agencies and reported for the Associated Press.
Learn more about James on his website and LinkedIn profile. You can access his scholarly articles via SemanticsScholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, PhilPeople, ORCID, and Web of Science. To learn more about how others have used his work, please visit his Google Scholar page. You can read James’ social science blog here and his personal blog here.
