In his major biography of the 'International Human Rights Movement', Aryeh Neier, the former head of Human Rights Watch, suggests that the rise of human rights coincided with a shift of Cold War rhetoric, from a focus on economic competition between communism and capitalism to one on the political conflict of 'repression, or totalitarianism, versus liberty, or human rights'. I argue that major international human rights and humanitarian NGOs embraced the central neoliberal dichotomy between commercial or 'civil society' – understood as a realm of freedom, voluntary interaction and distributed, private power that checked the centralised power of the state – on the one hand, and politics, understood as violent, coercive and conflictual on the other.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 60