Several recent influential histories of human rights have argued that rights-based humanitarian practice experienced what might be characterised as a ‘global turn’ in the late twentieth century. Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia and Randall Williams's The Divided World forward the argument that human rights transformed in recent decades into a distinctly internationalist force, one that operates beyond, and is legitimated by actors external to, the state. These authors argue that human rights are in the present period distinguished as a movement that stands above and as a counterpoint to the rights of states, and which mobilises and operates at the extra-state realm. Randall Williams writes in The Divided World that there is an ‘oppositional relation between two major postwar political forms, human rights and decolonization’. Far from a tool of anticolonial struggle, these Western scholars advance that human rights has functioned as something else, an idea that has worked to strengthen forms of neo-imperial power, especially by aligning with neoliberal projects of market expansion that have emphasised individual rights over collective self-determination, and exacerbated global inequality.

This chapter reconsiders this reading of modern human rights history, highlighting the sometimes contradictory relationship of human rights to state power in Uganda. More than simply the purview of transnational, extra-state actors, rights work and rights language have featured prominently at different moments in Uganda's postcolonial history. Notably, this chapter traces the ways Ugandans have utilised human rights discourse, created and deployed legal rights-based frameworks, and used human rights as a tool with which to imagine new kinds of political relationships and forms of state and civil society power. By tracing the ways human rights has emerged as an idea and a practice from the 1960s onwards, this chapter seeks to re-evaluate the kinds of political agency that rights-based models provide, and the ways rights-based political projects have shaped, and been shaped by, forces of decolonisation as well as by Ugandan forms of political agency. These have been projects that have used rights as tools of state building, and to forward arguments about what a just state and moral citizen should be. African activists, intellectuals, and politicians have been central to these projects, working to redefine the ways rights discourse can assert moral relations between citizens, and between the state and its subjects.

The purpose of this chapter, then, is twofold.