ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|2 pages
The new internationalism
chapter 2|16 pages
John Anderson – slave, refugee, and freedom fighter
chapter 3|20 pages
Investigating and ameliorating atrocities in the nineteenth century
chapter 5|22 pages
The Red Cross and the laws of war, 1863–1949
part II|2 pages
The interwar era
chapter 6|23 pages
United in their quest for peace?
chapter 7|17 pages
The “rights of man” and sex equality
part III|2 pages
The formative UN era
chapter 9|20 pages
Islam and UN human rights treaty ratification in the Middle East
chapter 10|18 pages
When the war came
part III|2 pages
The formative UN era
chapter 11|19 pages
“Why then call it the declaration of human rights?”
chapter 12|19 pages
Decolonization, development, and identity
chapter 13|16 pages
“When you are weak, you have to stick to principles”
part III|2 pages
The formative UN era
chapter 15|17 pages
Human rights movements and the fall of the Berlin wall
part IV|2 pages
After formal empire and the Cold War
chapter 19|21 pages
How women become human
part V|2 pages
The universal human rights pantheon in national contexts
chapter 25|20 pages
Rights in isolation
part VI|2 pages
New forms of accountability in a national security world (2001 to the present)
chapter 27|16 pages
The selectivity of universal jurisdiction
chapter 31|22 pages
Caged at the border
part VII|2 pages
The transformative impact of human rights on knowledge