Bücher der Reihe Human Rights in History

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.