In the 1970s human rights and market fundamentalism
gained prominence in the United States, Europe and Latin America. These were simultaneously discourses, ideologies, national movements and transnational networks, and policies that states and NGOs sought to impose. Human rights and market fundamentalism both claimed universal applic ability and dismissed previous ideologies; they
adhered to methodological individualism, critiqued the state, and marginalized the social. But despitestriking affinities, there is no single relationship between human rights and market fundamentalism from the 1970s through the 1990s. This talk explores three cases where human rights were defined and
new human rights policies developed, and where neoliberal policies were debated and implemented: in Eastern Europe, in Latin America and in the case of women’s economic rights as human rights.