Books in the Human Rights in History series

"A history of colonial legacies in United Nations peacekeeping from 1945-1971, focusing on the influence of UN staff deployed to conflicts in the Global South. Margot Tudor identifies the unexplored colonial structures, racial prejudices, and organisational politics that shaped UN peacekeeping practices during the instability of decolonisation"--

Daniela L. Caglioti shows how states at war, when faced with real or alleged security threats, redrew the boundaries between members and non-members, thus redefining belonging and the path to citizenship. A key text for those interested in questions of citizenship, human rights, immigration, national borders, international law and security.

In the historiography of human rights, the 1980s feature as little more than an afterthought to the human rights breakthrough of the previous decade. Through an examination of one of the major actors of recent human rights history - Poland's Solidarity movement - Robert Brier challenges this view. Suppressed in 1981, Poland's Solidarity movement was supported by a surprisingly diverse array of international groups: US Cold Warriors, French left-wing intellectuals, trade unionists, Amnesty International, even Chilean opponents of the Pinochet regime. By unpacking the politics and transnational discourses of these groups, Brier demonstrates how precarious the position of human rights in international politics remained well into the 1980s. More importantly, he shows that human rights were a profoundly political and highly contested language, which actors in East and West adopted to redefine their social and political identities in times of momentous cultural and intellectual change.

This volume presents the first global history of human rights politics in the age of decolonization. The conflict between independence movements and colonial powers shaped the global human rights order that emerged after the Second World War. It was also critical to the genesis of contemporary human rights organizations and humanitarian movements. Anti-colonial forces mobilized human rights and other rights language in their campaigns for self-determination. In response, European empires harnessed the new international politics of human rights for their own ends, claiming that their rule, with its promise of 'development,' was the authentic vehicle for realizing them. Ranging from the postwar partitions and the wars of independence to Indigenous rights activism and post-colonial memory, this volume offers new insights into the history and legacies of human rights, self-determination, and empire to the present day.

"For readers who are interested in the history of leftism, imperialism, human rights, internationalism, anti-imperialism, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Global Sixties. Of interest to those who wish to learn about prior attempts to change the world, why those internationalist projects failed, and why the present looks the way that it does"--

In the Cause of Humanity is a major new history of the emergence of the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention during the nineteenth century when the question of whether, when and how the international community should react to violations of humanitarian norms and humanitarian crises first emerged as a key topic of controversy and debate. Fabian Klose investigates the emergence of legal debates on the protection of humanitarian norms by violent means, revealing how military intervention under the banner of humanitarianism became closely intertwined with imperial and colonial projects. Through case studies including the international fight against the slave trade, the military interventions under the banner of humanitarian aid for Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, and the intervention of the United States in the Cuban War of Independence, he shows how the idea of humanitarian intervention established itself as a recognized instrument in international politics and international law.

This volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights from the Middle Ages to the present day. It situates this history within perennial struggles over obligation, while probing the relationship of social rights to questions of religion, race, gender, class, empire and globalisation.

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.

Offers a fresh interpretation of the social, cultural and ideological foundations that shaped the rapid expansion of the global NGO sector. Kevin O'Sullivan explains how and why NGOs became the primary conduits of popular compassion for the global poor and how this shaped the West's relationship with the post-colonial world.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.