Blog posted under History

There is a good interview with Bonny Ibhawoh about his recent book,  Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), in the New Books Network.

A recent book release of interest: Human Rights in Africa by Bonny Ibhawoh. 

Today, we’re interviewing Thomas West about his recent book on natural rights in the political theory of the American founding.

The American founding had plenty of discussions of natural rights. But there are plenty of controversies about natural rights and the American founding, ranging from the conceptual (what are natural rights?) to the practical significance (how important were natural rights to concrete political issues and constitutional design?).

By any reckoning, the Reformation had a huge historical impact. To help us think about the quincentenary of the Reformation, and its relevance to the study of human rights, I was delighted to have the chance to talk with Christine Helmer.

Historians discovered human rights in the late 1990s. Since then, lively conversations developed across almost every imaginable historical subfield, from medieval to modern. Much of the human rights historiography has been focused on the question of origins. Many historians have tried to locate the starting point of contemporary human rights ideas and practice, and they have suggested everything from as early as the twelfth century (and sometimes even earlier) to as late as the 1970s. Such enormous diversity of opinion can only be found in a field with widely divergent ideas about what in fact counts as “human rights.” The origins question is by no means settled and interesting debates on this issue continue. But in the last several years, many historians have been feeling fatigue set in on the origins debates. There is no reason that origins should be the organizing frame for the whole literature, and there is no shortage of alternative approaches available for historians of human rights to draw upon. This post is one way to make sense of (some of) what happened in the historiography over the last twenty years. I wrote it originally as a thought exercise for myself—there are of course other ways to think about the literature, and there’s a lot that I’ve left out of this (especially the many excellent and sophisticated histories written in the last few years). But it might also provide a useful introduction for non-specialists who would like to get a quick overview of how historians have written the history.

Samuel Moyn has his long-awaited book on human rights and economic inequality due out in March 2018.

H-Diplo has published a roundtable discussion on The World Reimagined, the recent book by Pozen Center director Mark Bradley.

A recent release likely to interest readers of this blog is This Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement by Sarah Azaransky

We're talking with Mark Bradley about his recent book, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge 2016).

This week, we're interviewing Mark Bradley about his recent book, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge 2016).

This week, we're interviewing Mark Bradley about his recent book, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge 2016).

This week, we’re doing an interview series with Mark Bradley about his recent book, The World Reimagined (2016).

Mass migration has been reshaping Europe and North and South America for at least 150 years, but not always in the same way. At some points, it has provoked the erection of walls and a wave of deportations and detentions. At other moments, states have actually competed to recruit migrants to fuel their economies, settle land, or make up for declining birthrates.

Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press (April 2017), The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi.

I always enjoy hearing how scholars find their subjects, whether they are graduate students working on their dissertation or are well-established professors working on a second or third book. I’m in the former category - a grad student - and I don’t have to look too far into the past for the story of how I started writing in the field of human rights.

Eric Posner (University of Chicago Law School) has posted a timely and thought-provoking paper on SSRN, “Liberal Internationalism and the Populist Backlash.” Well worth reading for anyone interested in human rights issues.

“Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” then presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a February 2016 campaign event in Bluffton, South Carolina. “Okay, folks, torture—you know, half these guys [say]: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works, okay?” At the time, I was finishing my recent book on Americans and human rights in the 20th century, and Trump’s repeated defense of torture, like so many of his pronouncements, struck me as relics of the past. Like many, I did not see the Trump presidency coming. Now less than one week into his presidency we already have a draft executive order that would reopen the “black site” prisons where terrorist suspects were detained and tortured during the George W. Bush Administration. And on Friday, Trump issued an executive order that suspended entry of all refugees into the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. Academics against Immigration Executive Order has rightly characterized the ban as “unethical and discriminatory treatment of law-abiding, hard-working, and well-integrated immigrants” that “fundamentally contravenes the founding principles of the United States.” The Trump presidency is unlikely to be remembered for its vigorous championing of human rights but it is already producing powerful forms of resistance that may put human rights center stage in the United States again. Why, again?

Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power by Anna Su was released earlier this year.