The social, the state, and the South: Afterword to the foreword by Nehal Bhuta

Nehal Bhuta’s Foreword retrieves a historical understanding of social rights that reopens debates about what the state ought to be and how it might be remade. This Afterword builds on Bhuta’s intervention by advancing two complementary propositions, drawing on the history of human rights in Latin America. First, it argues that the history and theory of social rights must attend to the international conditions of possibility of the social state. For many Latin American jurists and diplomats, social rights were once understood as requiring – and mobilised to demand – the international recognition of a state’s authority to reorganise society and the economy, often challenging rules on trade, investment, and state responsibility. Second, this Afterword argues that historians and jurists should ask how these more capacious understandings of international social rights faded, and what role law played in that process. Tracing this shift may help clarify what it would take to reconstruct a more ambitious programme of social justice, one capable of operating not only within states but across regional and global orders.