The Routledge History of Human Rights

Jean Quataert, Lora Wildenthal, Jean Quataert, Lora Wildenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000627459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

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.

1

INTRODUCTION

An open-ended and contingent history of human rights

Jean H. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal

This essay collection offers historical perspectives on an array of human rights themes. We have assembled it in order to provide a sampling of the state of the field in human rights history, to give teachers and students of human rights a useful resource, and to make our own distinct interventions into the historiography of human rights. Our authors are not all professionally located as historians; all, however, emphasize the importance of historical context to understanding a field that is urgent for both its intellectual and its practical importance.

We present here open-ended, contingent, non-linear and non-teleological histories of human rights. The very structure of the volume, which comprises essays that can stand alone as well as speak to each other (and, as e-chapters, are available for purchase both separately and in combination) helps to accomplish this task. It is important to us to avoid narratives of seemingly inevitable progress, and to avoid turns of phrase that imply that human rights are passed like a torch from generation to generation, that is, remain stable in content over time and across place. We do not seek to tell our readers one single story of human rights. Rather, we find manifold concepts and struggles and, like human rights themselves, these are often in tension with each other. Human rights are the stuff of contestation with no guarantees about the final result. Rights, after all, can be won and they can be lost; the cause of right alone cannot assure a just and fair outcome. While our collection provides no single or simple story, it is incumbent on scholars of human rights to help orient those who are new to this material. Our authors have ensured that their essays are comprehensible to those encountering the subject matter for the first time. We are mindful that human rights courses are often wide-ranging, while instructors (including ourselves) have necessarily limited areas of expertise – so we present this volume as a guide for both colleagues and students. Our volume refrains from folding these stories into a single formula, and therefore provides the necessary distance for a big picture of the strategic, political, and changing nature of human rights work.

The mutability and variety of political opportunities are revealed by a richly empirical, geographically and temporally diverse history of human rights. Our essays draw upon the settings of South America, North America, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. They foreground institutions ranging from nineteenth-century international commissions of inquiry to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN treaty-making process, and the UN Trusteeship Council, among others.

Here we will outline the points of emphasis that have guided this project and indicate our historiographical intervention. We give a brief glimpse of each essay in the volume, and suggest ways that readers might group essays to explore themes and temporal periods.

Our collection emphasizes non-linear versions of history, law, and the voices of globally dispersed activists. Regarding non-linear versions of history, it is important to us not to foreclose the significance of particular episodes by folding them into a larger narrative that could reinscribe familiar understandings and power relations, or imply inevitability. This commitment means attention to specifics of time and place. Deeper understanding of difference cannot be intuited; it must grow out of confrontations with other times, places, and viewpoints. A deep grounding in historical specificity – what historians call “historicization” – helps to overcome simple linear narratives of historical change, which too readily reinforce Eurocentric biases of much human rights scholarship. In the absence of solid empirical research and documentation, particularly of less frequently studied countries and eras, it is all too easy to assume that abstracted and generalized European patterns are or were globally normative. Our authors are committed to foregrounding the local as well as the distinctly national, regional, and often non-Western voices, perspectives, and struggles in human rights histories. We hope the case studies open new avenues for future research. Our authors make linkages and comparisons, showing how human rights discourses develop at various times; they do not emphasize claims about origins. Power is central to all these stories, but cannot be allowed to impose assumptions about what is important in histories of human rights. This is because histories about human rights show how our perceptions of power and weakness can be very different depending on the chronological or geographical scale of the investigation.

With respect to law, we note that human rights discourse is a heavily legalized discourse as well as a moral and philosophical one. Efforts at legalization are common (though interestingly not universal) in human rights activity; they aim to translate rhetoric and ideological and political movements into something institutionalized. Those demanding and debating human rights often invoke existing international law, or seek new conventions and treaties, or use the law as a rhetorical device to express what should or should not exist. Invocations of law can lead people to perceive law as that which settles conflict, as something reified and powerful. In fact, however, international and even domestic law is mutable and multifaceted in its meanings and impacts. Law does not necessarily affirm rights. Moreover, because interpretation is the essence of any actor’s invocation of law, its meaning derives precisely from competing interpretations. Law is the point of departure for debate, not a conversation stopper. A number of our authors are legal scholars conscious of their task of addressing non-lawyers. They explicate the workings of law in the context of human rights in a manner that emphasizes law’s open-endedness and mutability. Several offer novel interpretations of international human rights laws.

We bring forward a variety of voices of globally dispersed activists, especially those located outside centers of power in their own countries or located in countries found outside the circle of great powers. Ordinary people’s voices are vital to the history of human rights, which is in large part a history of social movements, and the essence of human rights is the challenge to authority. Moreover, the inclusion of voices from globally dispersed locations helps redress a Eurocentric and great power perspective that creeps into histories where states, not people, appear as the key human rights actors. Ideas alone, however alluring, are not self-executing; they need human interventions and agency to become real – that is, material, concrete, and institutionally and legally embodied.

These points of emphasis are important to us because unspoken expectations can govern how readers receive information about human rights. Human rights are highly politicized, which means that perceptions of them are partial and truncated at any given time and change considerably depending on the political moment. To gain a fuller understanding less constrained by our own political moment, it is important to take seriously contexts of past actions, advocacy, norms, and structures on their own terms. Moreover, the subject matter of human rights unleashes emotional responses in both authors and readers, and these emotional responses infuse understandings in ways we should be mindful of. The demand for impact and effectiveness in the area of human rights is high. Optimism and pessimism, frustration and empowerment swirl in the minds of activists, researchers, and readers, affecting how we analyze information in the domain of human rights. One result of human rights’ emotional freight can be an insistence on optimism, even against good historical judgement. Indeed, human rights can, if taken at their own prescriptive word, imply a teleological narrative of progress. Another result can be pessimism, including a dismissal of the power of ideas or of the relevance of seemingly useless past efforts. Worse, we can oscillate between these moods, with unreflected optimism flipping over rapidly to an equally unreflected cynicism. Like all movements resting on a politics of morality, human rights require emotional staying power. It is vital to escape a narrow perspective driven by a political moment, a mood, or reliance on an inevitably limited common sense.

The historical study of human rights confronts us with material much more complicated than a hopeful story of progress or a dismal series of disappointments. It shows us multifarious stories that demonstrate the power and contingency of human rights ideas and action. The reward is not a definite answer or formula to apply to the problem of the day. Rather, the reward is more sophisticated thinking about the very nature of the interaction of ideas, institutions, and human interventions, an interaction that continually renews human rights opportunities. All the while, human rights activists must deal with the long-standing claims of states to sovereignty, national defense, and national security – the legal props of state autonomy and power that most notably infringe on individual and group rights.

Historians are latecomers to the scholarship on human rights. For decades, the academic study of human rights was dominated by what we might call presentist perspectives of the social sciences, specifically sociology, political science and anthropology, and law. Such presentism arises from understanding human rights as a matter of policy challenges, and it highlights what seems effective or usable in the moment. Attention to change over time, including in the very meaning of human rights keywords, seems less pertinent in that context. Legal scholarship has tended to claim or imply an objective and universally valid method for reading legal doctrines, authoritative decisions, and the law’s structures and scope, independent of society. Such scholarship has taken the law too much at its own word by flattening time and space. These tendencies of legal scholars have limited historical inquiry and also the inquiry of students, who may well assume that if a law exists there must be no injustice.¹

Historians’ interest in human rights as a promising topic of research emerged around the 1990s. With the formal ending of the Cold War, the 1990s were simultaneously a high point of human rights nongovernmental organization (NGO) activities, which exploded across the globe, and an expression of sustained networks of global interconnections, which prompted new research on the historical foundations of transnational linkages. Both NGOs and intensified globalization challenged the centrality of the nation-state and led to experiments in transnational, international, and global histories.

The 1990s were a heady, optimistic time, and important early historical scholarship on human rights tended to present a story of unfolding progress and human rights as the self-evident fulfillment of the principles of human equality.² This literature presented a hoped-for usable past for activism in the form of human rights genealogies. However, these genealogies reflected some fallacies of historical interpretation. For example, all kinds of historical expressions of rights and moral principles were marshaled as forerunners of human rights, as if all those actors had somehow sought the same goal.³ This produced linear histories, in which the assumed end result of developments shaped the narrative, such that, for example, the human rights system established formally in the United Nations (UN) in 1945 became the intentional and predetermined result of the facts the historian had chosen. A related approach saw human rights in cyclical terms, with the 1990s supposedly witnessing a “revival” or “rebirth” of European Enlightenment “rights talk” and humanitarian sentiments from the eighteenth century.⁴ Here too, the past is used for the present, and Europe is situated as the prime locus of human rights thought. These publications contained many important insights, yet teleology and rebirth are flawed as frameworks for historical interpretation.

By the onset of the twenty-first century, an understanding of the paradoxes, unintended consequences, and ambiguities of human rights activism began to displace the early optimism. These phrases are now keywords of newer scholarship. This too reflects contemporary geopolitical transformations, which have led to a more sober assessment of the previous decade with its horrifying descent into wars, ethnic cleansing, and genocides, and also a mounting scholarly and activist critique of so-called humanitarian intervention and concern about the ease with which states have appropriated the language of human rights for invasion and occupation.⁵ Our section on accountability in the post-9/11 world shows the complicated politics of human rights advocacy in this new global setting.

Ironically, the loss of optimism has been fruitful for opening up new areas of critical research. Human rights history entered a period of vibrant historiographical discussion and reflection. Research now critically examined human rights visions in international politics after World War II, their intersection with Cold War imperatives and the reshaping of domestic politics, and their resurgence in the 1970s and after the Cold War’s end.⁶ The UN-led humanitarian military interventions in the 1990s raised questions about historical forerunners, turning all manner of humanitarian expressions into compelling topics for historical investigation.⁷ Other work analyzed women’s and feminists’ contributions to human rights visions, laws, and advocacy, bringing gender as an analytical method and a description of power relations and violations into play.⁸ Critique of international law from within and without helped bring about new rapprochement by legal scholars with historians.⁹ Influential works focused on the 1970s as “breakthrough decade” or new origin point for human rights.¹⁰ This was salutary for its rejection of longer chronologies that had posed the above-mentioned problems of intentionality and oversimplification. However, this claim rested on Euro-American mass participation in new human rights causes since the 1970s, rather than a global view of that era. While the “breakthrough” thesis has generated exciting new research, as a new master chronology it would distort the history of human rights in the global South and foreshorten specific chronologies. This collection responds with more open time frames and a more global perspective. It places the study of human rights in a wider geopolitical and cultural context.

Our chronology extends from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. We do not claim the mid-nineteenth century as the proper starting or origin point for a study of human rights movements, mobilizations, ideals, or histories. Rather, we draw attention to that moment because of a confluence of changes that collectively promoted new transnational identifications, sentiments, institutional networks, and border crossings. It was in the nineteenth century that the law of nations governing the relations among states took on many of its present-day characteristics, not least due to the truly global spread of imperial colonization. The older positive and customary law affecting war and peace, commerce and trade, among other critical arenas of interaction, came to be increasingly multilateral and to be increasingly written down as codes and rules, in the hope of strengthening its power and enforceability. These codifications were framed so as to invite future participation by additional sovereign states, and thus became lasting institutions that facilitated ever-denser global interconnections. These changes inaugurated a new era in legal history.¹¹ The expansion of international law’s scope and of states’ compliance became its own cause in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, both for the emerging profession of international lawyers and for a wide range of reformers and peace-minded men and women.

The volume’s nineteenth-century starting point draws attention to entanglement and contradiction, an inevitable accompaniment to developments in rights and law when analyzed in the context of the geopolitical order. The nineteenth century marked the onset of what historians call the new imperialism (roughly 1870–1914). International law and European empire were mutually constitutive, to the point where international law still carries imperialist connotations and is suspect regarding both objectives and effects.¹² Law has had continuous ties to various iterations of empire, from formal colonial rule in the later nineteenth century to more recent neoliberal policies, and from corporate interests to great power politics and rivalries.¹³ Rights language and its principle of nondiscrimination are not immune from co-optation and appropriation by these same forces and groups nationally and internationally. Human rights and international law both claim to adherence to universality, neutrality, and nonpartisan values, yet both are deeply entangled with power, imperial projects, national and elite self-interest, and the preservation of economic inequality. It is for this reason too that our story cannot simply be about progress. It is necessary to include the nineteenth century in critical histories of human rights in order to grasp the integration of international law, colonialism, and transnational reform movements. A prominent theme in this volume is the history of how those living under legacies of colonialism and in the midst of postcolonial predicaments have embraced, tested, and reform...