A New Theory of Human Rights: New Materialism and Zoroastrianism by Alison Assiter (Rowman & Littlefield, London 2021)

A New Theory of Human Rights is the most recent book written by Feminist Dissent collective member Alison Assiter. It is a rich and dense book that puts forward a series of very important arguments about how we can reconceptualise the concept of human rights. Assiter begins the book by noting that it wasn’t such a long time ago that many feminists and those on the left looked at the idea of human rights as an individualistic and bourgeois conception that should be transcended by a more radical form of politics. Liberal conceptions of human rights seemed so embedded in mainstream forms of politics among social democrats as well as conservatives that the idea of needing to construct a new theory of human rights would not have seemed particularly relevant. But this is clearly the case no longer; and central to this book’s raison d’etre is way this consensus has collapsed both on the right and the left. It has collapsed on the right through the emergence of forms of radically anti-democratic racist nationalism, sometimes religiously inspired, represented by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Naredra Modi – figures who have flaunted their nativist chauvinism, misogyny and contempt for the whole idea of rights. This state authoritarianism sits alongside the re-emergence of extreme right political movements, promulgating racist theories of ‘cosmic