The Reverse ‘Savages, Victims, Saviours’ Metaphor of Human Rights, by Shadi Mokhtari – 13 August 2025

Through the paradigmatic case of post-revolutionary Iran, this article argues critiques of power-laden human rights politics epitomised by Makau Mutua’s 2001 ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors Metaphor of Human Rights’ when combined with states’ anti-imperialist victim branding, and uncritical anti-imperialist solidarities give rise to a reactionary politics I call the ‘Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviours metaphor of human rights’. Here, anti-imperialist-branding states and their constructions of culture are recast as victims, and the state is treated as synonymous with the population it rules. Western imperialism, the human rights corpus, and those deploying human rights conceived of as extensions of Western imperialism are recast as the savages. Finally, leftist thinkers, anti-imperialist thought, and the resisting victim state and its constructions of Indigenous culture become the saviors. This politics eclipses local populations’ agency and lived experiences by (1) diminishing the moral weight of both the state’s transgressions and the human rights paradigm, (2) interrupting a sustained focus on the anti-imperialist-branding state’s acts of subjugation, (3) defining non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture as traditional saviourism does (but valorising rather than vilifying it), and (4) adhering to notions of moral complexity which deny or obscure the elements of moral clarity encompassed.

Shadi Mokhtari teaches at the School of International Service at American University in Washington D.C.. Her teaching and research focus on human rights, Middle East politics and the politics of human rights in and vis-à-vis the Middle East. In particular, she has focused on the dynamics of human rights contests, social movements, and/or political change in Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia and Bahrain at various points over the last 25 years.

This article first appeared in the Review of International Studies.

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