Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights

Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511921667.001

Cited by 37 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman rightly cautions historians against adopting "triumphalist" narratives stressing the "rise and rise" of human rights. 161 Nothing was inevitable about the emergence of our contemporary international human rights regime and writing about human rights in a linear and celebratory fashion only serves to obscure their true origins. More realistically, it makes more sense to conceive of human rights as evolving in unpredictable fits and starts from the late nineteenth century.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“At the Bar of Public Sentiment”

Nault¹

2019

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A key question in human rights history concerns when human rights originated. Common starting points include Greco-Roman civilization, the early eras of world religions, the French and American Revolutions, and the founding of the United Nations. Taking a very different approach, Moyn (2010) stresses that historians must distinguish between rights and human rights and determine when the former transitioned to the latter, suggesting that this shift took place in the 1970s. This paper agrees with Moyn’s idea that human rights require an international dimension that challenges state sovereignty from without, as opposed to rights and their restriction to the confines of the nation-state. However, it questions his periodization and historians’ tendency to view human rights as emerging in self-contained Western settings. It suggests instead that human rights originated as a concept in the 1890s in response to a crisis of colonial rule in Africa. Specifically, it posits that changing viewpoints of Africa and Africans within the international community made possible by atrocity tales concerning King Leopold II of Belgium’s Congo Free State commenced our human rights age. Birthed by the colonial encounter between Europe and Africa, human rights therefore represent more than the offspring of events, ideas or personalities in ancient or contemporary Western contexts but form part of a shared global heritage.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“At the Bar of Public Sentiment”

Nault¹

2019

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“…157 It is hardly surprising then that human rights in the immediate post-war era have been described as belonging in the conference room rather than in humanitarian networks associated with NGO and social movement activism from the 1960s and 1970s. 158 No wonder then that Mazower has demonstrated there was a good deal of Great Power politics at play in the establishment of the UN's rights regime. 159 When human rights activism took off among the Left within Britain, the ideas of the 1940s were not wholly resuscitated.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Civil Liberties to Human Rights? British Civil Liberties Activism and Universal Human Rights

Moores

2012

Contemporary European History

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This article discusses British civil liberties organisations hoping to engage in a broader human rights politics during and immediately after the Second World War. It argues that various movements and organisations from sections of the British Left attempted to articulate a human rights politics which incorporated political, civil, social and economic rights during the 1940s and early 1950s. However, organisations were unable to express this and mobilise accordingly. This reflected the collapse of the popular-front-style alliances forged in the 1930s and the difficulties in articulating political positions distinct from the ideological polarisation that emerged with the onset of the Cold War.

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“…Indeed, the Cold War and decolonization were intense social contests involving starkly divergent (even irreconcilable) ideologies and related normative packages: communism, socialism, liberalism, self-determination, trusteeship, etc. And yet, despite such social conflict, "humanity" (and its cognates, including "peacelovingness" and non-aggression) seemed at the time broad enough idioms that most state ideologies could construe and claim as their own (Betts, 2016;Hoffman, 2010;Özsu, 2016). Betts notes that after the war, "humanity remained a slippery term, and could be aligned to various causes, be they liberal or Christian, fascist, communist or racist" (2016: 62) Scholars of humanitarianism argue that, despite postwar political fractures, in the twentieth century "a secularized humanity became more fashionable and more widely regarded as providing the transcendent foundations for an international community defined by considerable diversity" (Barnett, 2011: 101-102).…”

Section: "Humanity" and Social Competition In The Postwar Normative Hmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social pressure and the making of wartime civilian protection rules

Mantilla

2019

European Journal of International Relations

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The protection of civilians from the dangers of warfare constitutes an imperative in contemporary global politics. Drawing on original multiarchival research, this article explains the codification of the core civilian protection rules within international humanitarian law in the 1970s. It argues that these crucial international rules resulted from the operation of two central mechanisms: Third World and Socialist-led social pressure and a strategic, face-saving reaction to it, leadership capture, in the politicized context of Cold War and decolonization-era international social competition. I demonstrate the conditional effect of social pressure by a coalition of materially weaker Third World and Socialist states upon powerful reluctant states: the United States, the United Kingdom, and more surprisingly, the Soviet Union. Third World and Socialist social pressure fostered a curious US-USSR backstage collaboration I label leadership capture, decisively shaping the legal compromise embodied in the civilian protection rules of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Theoretically, this article furthers burgeoning IR work on the connection between social pressure, status competition, and international rule-making. Empirically it presents a new archives-based history of an intrinsically important case in international law.

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Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights

Cited by 37 publications

References 50 publications

“At the Bar of Public Sentiment”

“At the Bar of Public Sentiment”

From Civil Liberties to Human Rights? British Civil Liberties Activism and Universal Human Rights

Social pressure and the making of wartime civilian protection rules

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