2025 Theses Master's

The Human Rights Economy: Economic Justice and the Politics of Basic Needs

Borchardt, Maia

This thesis analyzes the emerging discourse of the human rights economy (HRE), a conceptual framework developed in the past five years by human rights practitioners to advocate for the implementation of rights-based policies in the economic sphere. Reading the HRE as a conscious effort on the part of the human rights community to respond to criticisms that socioeconomic rights are insufficiently attuned to the phenomenon of widening wealth inequality, it explores how the rhetoric of basic needs is employed within the HRE to advocate for a redistributive macroeconomic agenda that mitigates economic disparities and contests the narratives of neoliberalism.

First, the thesis defines the human rights economy’s central components by analyzing the published materials that call for its implementation. Second, it draws upon the history of debates about the role of human rights in the economy to contextualize the HRE’s reclaiming of the economic vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Third, it contrasts the HRE’s redistributive approach with a predistributive one which takes into account the structural foundations of neoliberalism, arguing that the latter approach would help the HRE achieve its goal of leveling unequal economic structures.

Finally, it explores ways in which the policy agenda of the HRE could be strengthened by mobilizing the rhetoric of basic needs for a predistributive approach that emphasizes the fundamental egalitarian values of the human rights framework.