Commemorating human rights: Exploring origins, episodes, and historicity in constructing a human rights timeline.

Abstract

Historicizing and commemorating human rights struggles have become key aspects of contemporary human rights scholarship. Human rights violations represent the most extreme manifestation of political and social violence, and this often produces traumatic collective experiences that societies increasingly find necessary to commemorate and memorialize. Questions of origin and meaning are recurring themes in debates over historicizing and commemorating human rights struggles. Whereas many scholars locate the foundational history of modern human right in natural law and Western liberalism, others argue for a more eclectic understanding of the concept, focusing on divergent notions of rights across globe. This article reviews some of the dominant arguments in debates about the origins and meanings of human rights and explores their implications for constructing a historical human rights timeline for museum projects. It argues that a public history of human rights must engage multiple and contested narratives of human rights struggles and experiences. Such engagement is necessary even if the inherent analytical and interpretative tensions are not fully resolved.

Human rights: The role of psychological sense of global community.

“…Human rights represent basic rights inherent to all people (United Nations, 2009). Although human rights violations have received increasing attention in recent years (Ibhawoh, 2013;Ignatieff, 2001), the global community is still confronted with widespread human rights violations. A critical step in addressing these violations is to gain a better understanding of the psychological determinants that lead people to be concerned about human rights and to take action to promote them.…”

Psychology and human rights: Introduction to the special issue.

“…Most notable are the seminal volumes “Human Rights as Social Representations” (Doise, 2004) and “The Psychology of Rights and Duties” (Finkel & Moghaddam, 2005), which take stock of psychological research on human rights from different perspectives 1 . Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology has also occasionally published work on human rights (e.g., Dean, 2013; Elcheroth & Spini, 2009; Ibhawoh, 2013; Lykes, 2012; Stellmacher, Sommer, & Brähler, 2005). Despite all this, Ms. Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, recently argued in her keynote speech at the International Congress of Psychology that psychology and human rights have long been distinct fields, between which there should be more cooperation (Pillay, 2012).…”

Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist Romania

“…Transitional justice is underpinned by the notion of "never again", i.e., that learning about past violence will prevent it recurring in the future [36]. Therefore, memorial museums which interpret political violence are as much about provoking reflection on the present and future as they are about the past [13,17,74]. Indeed, this was explicitly recognized by the museum's founder who argued: "I have always said that the Memorial is not a path to the past, but to the present and future because the first problem is to understand, to understand communism, so that we can identify its remnants in today's society" (Ana Blandiana, interview).…”

“…Transitional justice museums are part of a broader trend towards museology which advocates social activism and progressive social change [16]. With their focus on both public education and memorialization, transitional justice museums are closely aligned with peace museums and human rights museums [17][18][19].…”