Books in the Human Rights in History series

This book investigates how humanitarian photography - the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries - emerged and how it operated in diverse political and social contexts, bringing together more than a dozen scholars working on the history of humanitarianism, international and nongovernmental organizations, and visual culture.

Night on Earth is a broad-ranging account of international humanitarian programs in Near East in the period following the First World War. Davide Rodogno reveals how international 'relief' and 'development' were intertwined long before the birth of the United Nations with humanitarians attempting to reshape entire communities and nations.

This groundbreaking study unpicks a tangled web of activists, bureaucrats, writers and politicians who championed, engaged with, critiqued or ignored what are today held to be the unassailable truths of universal human rights. Today's debates about freedom of religion, offshore detention and indigenous recognition have a long human rights history.

Historically delineates the problems of genocide as a concept in relation to rival categories of mass violence.

This volume showcases the work of a new generation of scholars interested in the historical connection between religion and human rights in the twentieth century, offering a truly global perspective on the internal diversity, theological roots, and political implications of Christian human rights theory.

A study of the emergence and development of humanitarian intervention from the nineteenth century through to the present day. Drawing from a multitude of disciplines, it investigates the complex and controversial debates over the legitimacy of protecting humanitarian norms and universal human rights by violent as well as non-violent means.

Examines how and why activists and politicians concerned about Latin American state violence challenged prevailing ideas about sovereignty and social activism by arguing for the inviolability of individual human rights. Written for activists and an interdisciplinary array of scholars including political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and lawyers.

This book investigates how humanitarian photography - the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries - emerged and how it operated in diverse political and social contexts, bringing together more than a dozen scholars working on the history of humanitarianism, international and nongovernmental organizations, and visual culture.

The Care of the Witness probes the ambiguities of witnessing to genocide, disaster, and war in the 'era of the witness'. This book will appeal to readers interested in collective memory, oral history, and human rights and humanitarian work, as well as in visual culture, political theory and ethics more broadly.

This book shows readers how and why human rights have become the moral language of our time. It explores the making of a twentieth-century global human rights imagination and its American vernaculars in times of war, decolonization and globalization during the transformative decades of the 1940s and 1970s.

This book fundamentally reinterprets the history of international human rights in the post-1945 era by documenting how pivotal the Global South was for their breakthrough. In stark contrast to other contemporary human rights historians who have focused almost exclusively on the 1940s and the 1970s - heavily privileging Western agency - Steven L. B. Jensen convincingly argues that it was in the 1960s that universal human rights had their breakthrough. This is a ground-breaking work that places race and religion at the center of these developments and focuses on a core group of states who led the human rights breakthrough, namely Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines. They transformed the norms upon which the international community today is built. Their efforts in the 1960s post-colonial moment laid the foundation - in profound and surprising ways - for the so-called human rights revolution in the 1970s, when Western activists and states began to embrace human rights.

An important examination of how modern humanitarian action rose through the transformation of the French intellectual and political landscape from the 1950s to the 1980s. Eleanor Davey explores how the 'sans-frontieriste' movement displaced radical left third-worldism as the dominant way of approaching suffering in what was then called the third world.

A study of the emergence and development of humanitarian intervention from the nineteenth century through to the present day. Drawing from a multitude of disciplines, it investigates the complex and controversial debates over the legitimacy of protecting humanitarian norms and universal human rights by violent as well as non-violent means.

The right of self-determination of peoples holds out the promise of sovereign statehood for all peoples and a domination-free international order. But it also harbors the danger of state fragmentation that can threaten international stability if claims of self-determination lead to secessions. Covering both the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century independence movements in the Americas and the twentieth-century decolonization worldwide, this book examines the conceptual and political history of the right of self-determination of peoples. It addresses the political contexts in which the right and concept were formulated and the practices developed to restrain its potentially anarchic character, its inception in anti-colonialism, nationalism, and the labor movement, its instrumentalization at the end of the First World War in a formidable duel that Wilson lost to Lenin, its abuse by Hitler, the path after the Second World War to its recognition as a human right in 1966, and its continuing impact after decolonization.

This book examines the relationship between the postwar German states and Third World liberation movements through historical analysis of humanitarian aid programs. Although these efforts functioned as an arena for Cold War power struggles, they fostered transnational collaboration. Hong brings a much-needed historical perspective to contemporary debates on global governance.

Through the biography of one extraordinary man at the centre of the human rights movement, this book reveals how the political and intellectual movement emerged from the experiences of a generation who endured two world wars, and gained the momentum to ultimately enshrine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

By focusing on specific instances of assertions or violations of human rights during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in the various arenas of global politics, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that emerged from these conflicts.

By focusing on specific instances of assertions or violations of human rights during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in the various arenas of global politics, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that emerged from these conflicts.

Explores how, in the aftermath of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, a transnational network of activists committed to human rights in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe made human rights a central element of East-West diplomacy.

This volume provides a new understanding of an issue at the heart of contemporary conflicts: distinguishing between civilians and combatants. A multi-disciplinary study of over a dozen case studies from across the world and over the last century, it upends current orthodoxies by showing the civil-military divide to be extremely dynamic.

By exposing the forgotten history of human rights in East Germany, this study places the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light, and demonstrates how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights.

The first transnational history of the Nigerian Civil War, exploring how the conflict, initially of marginal interest to much of the world, became 'Biafra', a global protest and media event, and a defining moment in the postcolonial history of humanitarianism, human rights, Holocaust memory and representation of the Third World.

A new interpretation of citizenship in socialist Eastern Europe and non-Western histories of human rights, based upon the vivid social and political history of Roma in Czechoslovakia. Celia Donert rewrites Roma as agents, not victims, of social citizenship, drawing on extensive original research in Czech and Slovak archives.

Focusing on Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the book provides a groundbreaking and multi-layered account of the most influential statement on religious freedom in human history. It examines the origins, background, key players, and outcomes of Article 18.

This is the first global history of human rights politics in the age of decolonization. Leading scholars demonstrate how human rights were embraced and deployed by a diverse collection of actors, including both nationalists and imperialists, activists and diplomats, in contesting self-determination and national independence.

This systematic overview of the main arguments made against human rights is the first of its kind. It proposes a strong democratic defence of human rights that is highly relevant in the current political climate. It will appeal to scholars and students of politics, law, history and philosophy.