The Cambridge History of Rights. Volume 5, The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries / edited by Samuel Moyn, Meredith Terretta.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Moyn, Samuel, editor.

Terretta, Meredith, editor.

Series:

The Cambridge History of Rights.

The Cambridge History of Rights

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human rights.

World politics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (648 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

The concept of a right, and the idea of human rights, were familiar abstractions on the brink of the twentieth century. But the history of political mobilization since shows that human rights had a transformative capacity in that century that no prior age had demonstrated. Through the twentieth century, human rights became institutionalized internationally in laws, movements, and organizations that transcended state-based citizenship and governance - which irrevocably changed the politics around them. Rights continued to evolve as the imperial world order transitioned to a postcolonial world of sovereign states as a primary form of political organization. Through twenty-six essays from experts around the world demonstrating how this period is historically distinctive, volume five of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title page

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Contents

List of Contributors to Volume V

General Introduction

Introduction to Volume V: Historicizing Rights: An Unfinished Project

Part I: Defining Concepts

Part II: Contesting Norms

Part III: Expanding Frameworks

Part I Defining Concepts

1 Genealogies of Human Rights

… What?

… Who?

… Why?

… When and Where?

Further Reading

2 Visions of Human Rights

Introduction

Before the Beginning: The 1946-47 UNESCO Inquiry

The UNESCO Inquiry

Bearing Witness: The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s

Twenty-First-Century Specialization

The Orthodox-Political Debate

Normative Problem-Solving for Puzzles in the Practice

Research Agendas for a Maturing Field

3 On the Critique of Rights

Critiquing Human Rights before Human Rights

Liberal Millenarianism and the Last Utopia

Is Another World Possible?

Arguing about Inequality after the Global Financial Crisis

Critiquing Human Rights on the Right

Conclusion

Part II Contesting Norms

4 Hierarchies of Rights

Economic and Social versus Civil and Political Rights

Other Contestations

5 Women's Rights in International Politics, 1900-67

Internationalizing Women's Causes, 1900-20

"Rights without Distinction as to Sex": Women's Regional and International Activism for International Standards, 1920-48

Women's Rights in the Early Human Rights Era: Specialized Treaties and Comprehensive Visions, 1948-67

6 Transnational NGOs and Human Rights

Interpretations

Traditions and Trajectories

Human Rights NGOs in Action

Geographies of Human Rights Activism

7 Rights and Empire

Introduction.

On Imperial and Colonial "Legal Pluralisms"

On "Contrasting Principles," and Diverse Realities

Managing the Right to Rights

8 Race, Rights, and the Politics of Petitioning

Movements against Racism and the Rise of a Right to Petition

Racism as Rights Violation

A Right to Non-Discrimination

An Appeal to the World and the Meaning of a Petition over Race and Rights

9 Human Rights and Self-Determination

Unruly Concepts

Debates Old and New - An International Legal Perspective

10 Regional Rights Projects and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century

Of Concepts: Regions, Decolonization, and Rights

Pan-Movements and the Emergence of Regional Rights Projects

Decolonization, Development, and the Struggle for Economic Rights

Human Rights and Regional Courts

11 Development as the Imperialism of "Free" Trade: Rights, Liberalism, and the Engineering of African Economies

Imperialism and Underdevelopment: The Right to Colonize

The Imperialism of Free Trade

Development as Freedom? Postcolonial States and Economies

12 Economic and Social Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

Constitutionalism, Social Movements, and Socioeconomic Rights, 1917-45

Social Internationalism and the Evolution of International Human Rights, 1945-1970s

Delegitimization and the Loss of History: The 1970s and Its Aftermaths

13 Rights and Communism

Socialism, Rights, and the Soviet Revolution

The Stalin Constitution Goes Global

Communism and the Rise of International Human Rights

Dissent and Normalization

Reform and Collapse

Further Reading.

14 Human Rights and Cold War Foreign Policy

Postwar Hopes and Cold War Realities

Accusations and Anxieties

Postcolonial Dilemmas

Activism and Pragmatism

Transcending the Cold War

Old Assumptions and New Possibilities

15 The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights and the New Rights Ecosystem

Negotiating Human Rights in "a Post-Post World War II Era"

The Promise and Challenge of Working within "the Same Language" of Human Rights

Contesting the Constrained "New World Order" of Rights: Southern NGOs and Structural Violations

Beyond "Tired Geneva-Based Groups?" The Modesty of the Post-Cold War Human Rights Era

Conclusion: Human Rights within or against "a Narrow Civil Liberties Framework?"

Part III Expanding Frameworks

16 Rights Without Subjects: A History of Children's Human Rights

From Material to Psychological Needs

From Liberation to Participation, Protection, and Provision

17 Christianity, Religious Rights, and Decolonization

Regulating Religion before the Separation: Protestant, Catholic, and Secular Visions

Varieties of Secular Statecraft and the Birth of Christian Rights against the State

Bifurcating International Religious Rights

Religious Rights as Remnant: The Rise and Fall of Postwar Anti-Colonial Alternatives

18 Resistance and Insistence: Making Postcolonial Indigenous Rights

Assimilative Native Rights

Making Postcolonial Rights in the Era of Decolonization

Internationalizing Indigenous Rights

Predicaments of Indigenous Rights

19 (Trans)gender Identity and International Human Rights Law

Gender Identity, Gender Modality, and the Cisgender Matrix

Emerging Gendered Subjects in IHRL.

The Emergence of Queer and Gender-Diverse Identities in IHRL

The Yogyakarta Principles and Queering IHRL

Terms of Inclusion?

Constructed and Excluded Subjects

Pathologization

Protectionism and the Hegemonic Victim-Subject

Normative Westernization

Disaggregating SO+GI

Anti-Gender Pushback

20 The Rights of Artificial Intelligence

Functionalism

An Analogy with Animal Rights

Personhood

What Should AI Rights Be?

Is It Ethical to Make Sentient Artificial Intelligences?

21 Health

The Origins of a Right to Health

Public Health

Universal Insurance

International Public Health before the World Health Organization and Universal Declaration of Human Rights

World War II

After the UDHR

22 Memorialization, Commemoration, and Rights

The Politics of Memory

Memorialization Practices

Memorialization and Commemoration as Human Rights

Historical and Transitional Justice

Tensions of Memorialization

Decommemoration and Counter-Memorialization

23 Transitional Justice, Legal Non-Performatives, and the Sentiments of Moving on

Legal (Non-)Performatives and the Structural Conditions of Inequality

Forgiveness as Non-Performative in the Politics of "Truth and Reconciliation"

Legal Non-Performatives and the ICTR

The Legal Non-Performatives that Narrativize R2P

Conclusion: Toward a Reframing of the Politics of Transitional Justice

24 Human Rights and Warfare

The Invention of Humanitarian Law

The 1949 Geneva Conventions

Algeria and South Africa

Human Rights in Armed Conflict

The Additional Protocols

Human Rights Warriors

25 Rights and Environmental Change.

Introduction

Natural Rights and Instrumental Valuing of Nature

Rights as Tools for Environmental Protection

Three Challenges: Thresholds, Causality, Territoriality

Future Generations' Rights

26 Empires of Real Estate: Neoliberal Legality and the Right to Housing

The Right to Housing

Financialization and Residential Real Estate

Conclusion: A Right to the City?

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Feb 2026).

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-108-94504-X

1-108-94580-5

1-108-93883-3

OCLC:

1574117950