Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

A blog post by Matilde Da Luz on 18 March 2026 of Columbia University is not directly related to human rights defenders but so interesting that it is reproduced here in full:

By now, most women recognize the script. Raise a point about sexism, feminism, or gender equality and the response is often predictable. You are “angry.” You are “too woke.” You have, somehow, made things awkward. The figure of the angry feminist woman has become so familiar that it no longer feels like an accusation so much as a reflex – a shorthand for dismissing political discomfort without engaging it. You become labelled, often unconsciously, as the “killjoy.”

What is striking is that this stereotype persists at a moment when anger is hardly in short supply. Much of it belongs to men, and is increasingly confident, public, and political. It circulates online, where terms like incel and manosphere emerge in everyday vocabulary. It is surfacing in dating culture, classrooms, and family conversations, where feminism is framed less as a demand for equality than as a provocation. And it is showing up in electoral politics.

According to a recent study that analyzed the 2024 European Parliament elections, more than 21 percent of young men aged 18–29 voted for far-right parties, compared to around 14 percent of young women. This marks one of the clearest gender gaps in far-right support among younger voters across Europe. The more interesting question, then, is not why women continue to be frustrated by patriarchy, but why so many young men appear increasingly angry – and why that anger seems to be so easily mobilized by populist language.

These questions matter since they sit at the intersection of two developments that have often been discussed separately: the rise of far-right populism and the growing difficulty of human rights discourse in reaching young men. Analysts tend to explain young men’s support for the far right through conditions such as economic anxiety, cultural backlash, or online radicalization. However, while these explanations are not wrong, they often miss something central. Far-right populism offers, very compellingly, a way of making grievance feel politically intelligible. At the same time, the language of human rights, which is ostensibly universal, egalitarian, and moral, consistently fails to resonate with this same group. Why is that?

Put differently: why do young men gravitate toward far-right populism, and why does human rights language so often fail to reach them? In truth, populism’s success and human rights’ struggle with this demographic turn out to be two sides of the same affective and gendered coin.

Far-right populism works, in part, because it is emotionally economical. It is successful in offering a pretty clear story about who has been wronged and who is to blame. So-called “ordinary people” are portrayed as betrayed by the elites and threatened by outsiders, which usually results in a moral landscape drawn in bold lines. Hence, politics becomes a struggle between betrayal and redemption, insiders and outsiders, rescue and decline. Interestingly enough, the subject at the center of this story is often presented as implicitly masculine: the sidelined worker, the disrespected citizen, the young man who feels displaced by feminism, multiculturalism, or economic change.

The appeal here, instead of ideological, is primarily affective. Populist narratives do not ask people to manage resentment, or to adapt their anger into appropriate language or tone. Instead, they expertly validate it. Woundedness is treated as evidence that something is wrong, and the emotion can no longer be overcome. Consequently, anger becomes legible, even reasonable.

The manosphere provides the perfect illustration of how this emotional logic can take shape well before it reaches the ballot box. These online spaces are frequented by men who successfully reframe their personal frustrations into a collective grievance of sorts. Incel culture, in particular, offers men a way to interpret loneliness, rejection, or economic insecurity as structural and systemic injustices that are, in turn, blamed on women and feminism. The appeal lies, then, in the comfort of certainty – the reassurance that their frustrations have an identifiable cause.

This anger, however, is also material. Masculinity has long been bound up with material arrangements that once offered stability and recognition, especially waged labor. As these arrangements erode, insecurity is no longer experienced only as an economic loss. Rather, it becomes existential. When economic institutions no longer sustain the forms of masculine authority they once did, insecurity is lived as a disruption of gendered meaning which, in turn, produces an affective opening for populist recruitment. Loss demands explanation, and far-right populism is efficient at providing one.

Human rights discourse, on the other hand, speaks in a very different register. It tends to be careful, professionalized, and abstract, emphasizing universality, dignity, and legal principle. It often assumes a rational subject – someone capable of setting aside their own personal grievances in favor of universal principles. In fact, contemporary human rights talk has increasingly framed itself as a project of restraint, focused on preventing the worst harms rather than focusing on articulating a substantive vision of justice.

Arguably, human rights language can be emotionally compelling for those already disposed toward empathy. The difficulty is that, in a political moment marked by an erosion of empathy and an intensification of hostility – increasingly directed at women and feminism – this association can have the opposite effect. In truth, human rights discourse is often perceived by young men as “feminized”, not because of its commitments to gender equality, but because of its association to empathy, vulnerability, protection and care – traits that patriarchal orders frequently characterize as feminine. This can further alienate young men who already feel dismissed, blamed, or morally lectured.

The contrast is, therefore, stark. At the same time that populism validates and valorizes woundedness, human rights seek to neutralize it. In this sense, populism animates emotional life, whereas human rights assume a rational subject who is willing to rise above it. For young men whose political identities are boomingly shaped by feelings of loss and displacement, far-right populism feels personal. Human rights feel procedural.

This does not mean that human rights lack emotional appeal. Contrarily, humanitarian campaigns have long relied on images of suffering to mobilize concern. But these appeals typically work through pity rather than grievance, and compassion rather than anger. They usually frame people as victims in need of protection, not as political subjects whose injuries demand some sort of structural change, much like populists do. In a political moment increasingly organized around resentment, this framing can feel misaligned.

This dynamic essentially reshapes the terrain of political identification itself. As grievance grows more consistently recognized and organized through populist frames, hostility toward feminism is structurally reinforced, and, at the same time, equality is emergently experienced by young men as loss. In this context, human rights struggles to appear as a credible site of recognition in a political scene where belonging is produced through exclusionary ideologies.

Within these circumstances, deeper questions arise. If contemporary politics is increasingly organized through fear, anger, and the pleasures of moral certainty, what kind of ethical and political subject can human rights still presume, and cultivate? In other words, in a world where resentment so efficiently creates “the people,” how can empathy win without becoming naïve, moralizing, or politically empty?

https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/rightsviews/2026/03/18/populism-speaks-to-young-men-why-dont-human-rights/