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The Routledge History of Human Rights is an interdisciplinary collection that provides historical and global perspectives on a range of human rights themes of the past 150 years.
The volume is made up of 34 original contributions. It opens with the emergence of a "new internationalism" in the mid-nineteenth century, examines the interwar, League of Nations, and the United Nations eras of human rights and decolonization, and ends with the serious challenges for rights norms, laws, institutions, and multilateral cooperation in the national security world after 9/11. These essays provide a big picture of the strategic, political, and changing nature of human rights work in the past and into the present day, and reveal the contingent nature of historical developments. Highlighting local, national, and non-Western voices and struggles, the volume contributes to overcoming Eurocentric biases that burden human rights histories and studies of international law. It analyzes regions and organizations that are often overlooked. The volume thus offers readers a new and broader perspective on the subject.
International in coverage and containing cutting-edge interpretations, the volume provides an overview of major themes and suggestions for future research. This is the perfect book for those interested in social justice, grass roots activism, and international politics and society.
List of contents
1. Introduction: An Open-Ended and Contingent History of Human RightsPart 1. The New Internationalism2. John Anderson - Slave, Refugee, and Freedom Fighter: A Human Rights Campaign in the Age of Empire3. Investigating and Ameliorating Atrocities in the Nineteenth Century: International Commissions of Inquiry in the Balkans (1876-1880)4. Reclaiming Congo Reform for the History of Human Rights5. The Red Cross and the Laws of War, 1863-1949: International Rights Activism before Human RightsPart 2. The Interwar Era: The League of Nations6. United in their Quest for Peace? Transnational Women Activists between the World Wars 7. The Rights of Man and Sex Equality: International Human Rights Discourses in the 1930sPart 3. The Formative UN EraA. UN Treaty Making8. Social and Economic Rights: The Struggle for Equivalent Protection9. Islam and UN Human Rights Treaty Ratification in the Middle East: The Impact of International Law on Diplomacy10. When the War Came: The Child Rights Convention and the Conflation of Human Rights and the Laws of WarB. Decolonization11. Why Then Call It the Declaration of Human Rights? The Failures of Universal Human Rights in Colonial Africa's Internationally Supervised Territories12. Decolonization, Development, and Identity: The Evolution of the Anticolonial Human Rights Critique, 1948-197813. When You are Weak, You Have to Stick to Principles: Botswana and Anti-Colonialism in Human Rights HistoryC. Socialist and Capitalist Versions of Human Rights14. The International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Gender of Economic Rights15. Human Rights Movements and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Explaining the Peaceful Revolution of 198916. Human Rights in China:
About the author
Jean H. Quataert is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at Binghamton University, USA and co-editor of the Journal of Women’s History (2010–20). She has published many books and articles, including Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilization in Global Politics (2009) and "A New Look at International Law: Gendering the Practices of Humanitarian Medicine in Europe’s ‘Small Wars,’ 1879–1907," Human Rights Quarterly, 2018, vol. 40, no. 3, 547–69.
Lora Wildenthal is John Antony Weir Professor of History and Associate Dean of Humanities at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA. She is the author of German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (2001) and The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (2013).
Summary
The Routledge History of Human Rights is an interdisciplinary collection that provides historical and global perspectives on a range of human rights themes of the past 150 years. It is perfect for those interested in social justice, grass roots activism, and international politics and society.
Report
'Through deft case studies from the nineteenth century to the present day that span the globe, this remarkable collection draws together leading scholars in the field to offer a primer in human rights history as it ought to be written: attentive to power, contestation and contingency, the legacies of empire, the growing reach of the human rights imagination and the diverse often non-Western actors that made it so. It is a marvelous achievement.'
Mark Philip Bradley, University of Chicago, USA
'This is a very stimulating collection of essays that succeeds in capturing the diverse and colorful histories of human rights in all of their ups and downs. The contributors eschew progress narratives and temptations to identify single foundational years or decades, but shed immense new light on key episodes. It is clearly an indispensable reference work.'
Philip Alston, New York University School of Law, USA
