BOOK REVIEW ESSAY Human Rights Under Siege Mianzhi Francis Cao 1 Published online: 9 April 2019 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Fragile Freedoms: The Global Struggle for Human Rights edited by Steven Lecce, Neil MacArthur, and Arthur Schafer Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East by Steven A. Cook Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 Human Rights in China: A Social Practice in the Shadows of Authoritarianism by Eva Pils Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018 Three recent books consider how the rise of authoritarianism impacts the preserva- tion of human rights to an increasingly desperate degree. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was not the first encroachment on the liberal world order this decade. The tragic downturn of the Arab Spring after 2013, for instance, took many seasoned political observers by surprise. Almost simultaneously, China’ s voice on domestic and international issues became unprecedently assertive, even aggressive. Additionally, the impact of the Trump administration’ s human rights posture is increasingly spread outside U.S. borders and associated with adjacent Canada, which is proud of its global reputation as a defender of human rights. Steven A. Cook’ s False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East tackles the false optimism that the 2010–2013 uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Turkey entailed in relation to democracy and political stability in the Middle East. Against the wishful thinking of many rights advocates, the region witnessed the emergence (or according to the author’ s thesis, the resurgence) of instability, which gradually suffocated the illusion that the process toward peace and prosperity had already taken place. Moreover, the revolutionary energy unleashed by the protests Human Rights Review (2019) 20:249–253 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-019-0553-7 * Mianzhi Francis Cao Francismcao@gmail.com 1 Department of Law, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany