Concrete Utopia&8239; conceptualizes the human rights project of the last two and a half centuries as a "backward-looking" endeavor, which, in order to move forward, must return to the utopian roots of its foundational documents.&8239;&10;Human rights&8239;advance by judging the ills of&8239;the present world from a standpoint&8239;in the future where&8239;they&8239;might&8239;no longer exist-a fundamentally utopian gesture.&8239;This peculiar character of human rights makes them continually ripe for reinvention and for responding to changing world circumstances.&8239;Looking at topics such as the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s, public outrage to the Vietnam War, the US civil rights movement and the founding of Amnesty International in 1961, this book surveys the history of human rights and&8239;how they have been&8239;reconceived at different points in time.&8239;It closes by sketching&8239;the way they may&8239;be&8239;re-envisioned for new struggles&8239;in the 21st century.&10;At a time&8239;when&8239;the human rights project has endured criticism&8239;for being toothless or&8239;even&8239;for&8239;providing a pretext for military&8239;invasions, Kaleck argues that the current global crises, from inequality, to ecological collapse and the&8239;&8220;age of pandemics,&8221;&8239;can be&8239;countered&8239;by&8239;reinventing&8239;human rights&8239;work&8239;through feminist, decolonial and ecological&8239;interventions.