In his 2001 Harvard Law Review article, “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights” (SVS), Makau Mutua critiques how human rights politics often casts non-Western states and cultures as savages, their populations as victims, and Western actors and their human rights prescriptions as saviors. American leaders highlighting the plight of Afghan women to justify both the war in Afghanistan and the use of torture against Taliban and al Qaeda members the United States detained is a classic example of this.

SIS professor Shadi Mokhtari’s new research article in the Review of International Studies argues that critiques like Mutua’s, while important, produce a reactionary politics she calls the “Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors” (Reverse SVS) metaphor in which the new victims are non-Western, self-described “anti-imperialist” states; the new savages are human rights seen as a Western imperialist project; and the new saviors are anything labeled anti-imperialist resistance. In these cases, the population is treated as one with the state and seen as suffering only at the hands of imperialist actors, not their own states.

To learn more, we asked Mokhtari a few questions about this metaphor and its consequences, how Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests fit into this framework, and how to reframe the discussion around human rights politics.

For someone new to this topic, what is the “Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors” metaphor?

The Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors metaphor of human rights is a critique of a politics that downplays the repression and violence of states viewed as victims of Western imperialism while adopting a de facto skepticism of human rights claims made against them. This politics is often spurred by a drive to counter Western states’ longstanding cooptation of human rights and women’s rights to justify devastating geopolitics and wars in the Middle East and beyond. Yet, in order to avoid being Western saviors, designating non-Western states and cultures as backward while providing propaganda for Western wars, those who practice Reverse SVS politics offer uncritical solidarities to oppressive governments that brand themselves “anti-imperialist”.

To be clear, I do not seek to reject Mutua’s powerful critique. It sheds light on very real and very harmful deployments of human rights. What I seek to challenge is the reactionary politics that many with whom the critique resonates adopt. Once they appreciate the dynamics the SVS metaphor brings to light, they have a hard time seeing beyond it or applying any other lens through which they can understand human rights claims being made. For them, virtually all human rights claims against a state subject to unjust Western politics become suspect as either an excuse for imperialism or a form of saviorism. Being subject to Western imperialism thus provides anti-imperialist branding states with a victimhood status that leaves little room for seriously engaging with the injustices they perpetrate.

What are the real-world risks and/or consequences of viewing human rights through this lens?

Simply put, Reverse SVS politics makes us indifferent to the suffering caused by anti-imperialist victim branding states and undermines local and diaspora struggles against them. I point to four ways this happens.  

First, this politics diminishes the moral weight accorded to human rights claims made by local and diaspora voices, the state violence they endure, and the human rights paradigm itself. This means an account of a student activist arrested and tortured by the anti-imperialist branding state can come to be seen more as a tool of Western imperialist politics than an account of an actual moral wrong to be condemned. 

Second, Reverse SVS politics interrupts any sustained focus on anti-imperialist branding states’ repression by redirecting the focus to Western states’ transgressions, double-standards, and hypocrisy. When Iranian and diaspora activists want to shed light on the Iranian government’s oppression, they are often challenged to justify why they do not speak of the United States’ abuses in Abu Ghraib, the women’s rights violations by American allies like Saudi Arabia, or its support for Israeli atrocities, shifting the conversation away from the Iranian state’s transgressions to American double standards. 

Third, Reverse SVS politics define non-Western populations through essentialist notions of their culture or religion, just as traditional saviorism does, but this time, valorizing rather than vilifying culture. For example, it uncritically concedes legalized discrimination against Iranian women as Islamic authenticity and a means of challenging Western cultural imperialism, while it portrays Iranian women as largely in harmony with imposed discriminatory laws.  

Finally, Reverse SVS politics creates moral ambiguity by emphasizing moral complexity and denying moral clarity in relation to injustices carried out by anti-imperialist branding states. For example, in relation to veiling, many progressive voices rightly treat veiling as having complex meanings and being capable of reflecting women’s agency. Yet they rarely take clear moral stances against the subjugation and denials of agency of mandatory veiling, where moral clarity does exist. Thus, in promoting moral complexity and denying concurrent moral clarity, they undermine valid rights claims. 

Iran’s 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests received global media attention. How do they fit (or not fit) into this framework?

This is what I touch on at the end of the article and am expanding on in a larger project. Iran’s dramatic 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, spurred by the state killing of Mahsa Jina Amini, move the discussion further in two key ways. First, the early “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests demonstrated how it is possible to transcend both Savages, Victims, Savior and Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors politics. Second, the diaspora’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests shed light on how the Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors critique can itself be instrumentalized and used to bring us back full circle to SVS politics.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests’ stunning iconic images of Iranian women defiantly leading the protests, raising their fists, burning veils, dancing without veils, and chanting slogans against cultural impositions in the name of religion and their “anti-imperialist state” in the face of security forces’ violence made it difficult to uncritically see the Iranian state as a victim. There was no central imperialist actor or anti-imperialist filter through which to explain away or muddy the regime’s highly visible repression or cultural impositions. Iranian women demonstrated that they were neither agentless victims of their culture, nor in harmony with the discrimination and violence to which they have been subjected in the name of culture and anti-imperialist resistance for 43 years. Still, they were not fighting an inherently backward Islam, but oppressive political structures assembled in its name. Finally, protesting Iranians also sought international solidarity and the promise of the human rights framework. 

Soon, however, conservative diaspora forces who took up “Woman, Life, Freedom” mobilizations abroad deployed a mix of Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors critique and conspiracy theories to wage vicious cyber-campaigns charging diaspora progressives of normalizing the regime and whitewashing its repression. While these narratives were not entirely organic as they were being promoted on the Saudi-funded Iran International news channel, from diaspora political leaders and on Israeli-backed social media accounts, the indictments of Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors politics clearly struck a nerve with large segments of the Iranian diaspora because it accorded with a key aspect of their lived experience of the regime—its brutality and moral corruption, while progressive diaspora politics largely seemed to sidestep it.  

At least in part, because the Reverse SVS critique resonated so strongly with them, a significant segment of the broader diaspora population gravitated towards the discourses and prescriptions of the conservative forces making it. This included championing sanctions, calling for the end to nuclear weapons negotiations with the regime, putting forth ambiguously formulated calls for regime change, and more and more voices floating the idea of American or Israeli military intervention in Iran. With the regime’s unrelenting repression largely shutting down contention inside the country and conservative diaspora politics largely co-opting “Woman, Life, Freedom” abroad, the moral clarity around the regime’s subjugation of Iranians once again dissipated.  

At the same time, numerous diaspora activists regularly used impassioned denunciations of Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors politics to arrive at signature Savages, Victims, Saviors discourses on Iran, Israel, and the "backwardness of Islam." Taking their cue from diaspora activists, Marco Rubio and Benjamin Netanyahu adopted the ‘Iranians are not the Islamic Republic’ mantra, with Benjamin Netanyahu uttering “Woman, Life, Freedom” in his statement justifying the start of the June 2025 military attack on Iran and the bombing of some of the same people who had taken to the streets with the slogan almost three years earlier. Right-wing diaspora voices echoed that Israel was attacking the Islamic Republic, not Iran or Iranians, as they posted videos of the young “Woman, Life, Freedom” protesters killed by the regime.   

This trajectory of the human rights politics of “Woman, Life, Freedom” mobilizations demonstrates that just as the critique of Savages, Victims, Saviors politics can be used to justify, downplay, and obscure the moral clarity of or redirect attention away from grave local injustices, the critique of Reverse Savages, Victims, Saviors politics could be used to obscure the moral clarity or redirect attention away from international injustices and even the devastation of another Middle East war. The critiques are important but the politics they can spur in which adherents can only see one source of injustice, is deeply problematic.

If you could reframe the way we talk about human rights struggles, what would that new conversation look like? 

First, human rights and other emancipatory projects should be more focused on identifying injustices than victims, and more capable of recognizing multiple sources of non-Western populations’ suffering. 

Second, we should recognize that progressive politics can become alienating and morally incoherent to people when it refuses to address its own contradictions and becomes too far removed from the lived experiences of the people whose plight it seeks to advance.   

Third, accounts of human rights violations or other injustices are widely instrumentalized (or, as it is often called these days, weaponized), including through Savages, Victims, Saviors politics. When they detect an injustice is being instrumentalized, people tend to react by mobilizing to fight the weaponization and either downplaying or ignoring the injustice being instrumentalized.  In part, this stems from a belief that the way to fight the instrumentalization of an injustice is to not talk about the injustice, because then you would be saying the same thing as the people instrumentalizing the injustice.

In the Iranian case, the regime’s anti-imperialist brand and claims to Islamic authenticity, right-wing forces’ weaponization of Iranians’ oppression and segments of the left downplaying the regime’s oppression to prevent its instrumentalization by right-wing forces, feed off of each other and serve to drown out, overshadow, and muddle the essential moral stance of Iranians in a sea of contestation whenever they muster the courage to take on the regime. Those who seek to further rights and dignity should distill injustices from their instrumentalization and challenge each separately.   

Finally, metaphors as well as critical theories are useful tools for making sense of complex dynamics, yet we can become trapped within their logics. In fact, the better they are at crystallizing messy relationships or the operation of power, the more they “stick,” and the harder it is for us to be able to see beyond their confines. While both Savages, Victims, Saviors and Reverse, Savages, Victims, Saviors metaphors shed light on and pose important critiques of human rights dynamics, we should simultaneously be able to draw from them where the metaphors fit and look elsewhere where they do not. We should also try to avoid rejecting the politics captured by one of these metaphors only to arrive at the politics captured by the other.