Human rights and political freedoms have been under siege in quite unprecedented ways since the end of the Cold War. 1 Based on the Freedom House (2019) report, people from sixty-eight countries experienced severe deterioration in civil and political rights in 2018, while only fifty countries registered net improvements. In addition, the same report recorded a global deterioration of political freedoms for the previous thirteen consecutive years, from 2005 to 2018. While the post-Cold War era facilitated the emergence of liberal democracies worldwide, a considerable number of those countries that transitioned toward democratization have faced significant hurdles in consolidating their regimes. Similarly, CIVICUS (2019), a global consortium of civil society organizations, finds that a majority of countries worldwide have an "obstructed," or even worse "repressed," civic space, where political dissent against state abuses could flourish. 2 Globally, very few countries have an "open" civic space, many of which are located in Northern Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand. In the entire American continent, only four countries have an "open" civic space classification, namely, Canada, Uruguay, Suriname, and Costa Rica. Accordingly, the civic space in the United States, however, deteriorated and "narrowed" under the Trump administration. Particularly, the Human Rights Watch (2019, 1) report maintains that the United States has "continued to move backward on human rights at home and abroad in the second year of former president Donald Trump's administration," which "were able to pass laws, implement regulations, and carry out policies that violate or undermine human rights."This perception of decline in the U.S. government's commitment to human rights becomes more worrying, especially when we consider the U.S. government's long-standing reliance on human rights and humanitarian discourses to justify and to legitimize its foreign policy interventions abroad (Forsythe 2011). Many of these so-called humanitarian actions have generated enormous damage to human
