Human Rights

Human rights have emerged from the concept of natural rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen during the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century, and culminated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, when it was adopted by the UN General Assembly. However, it was not until the 1970s that human rights discourse has begun dominating global agendas, and scholars have been sparring over the genealogy of human rights. The nineteenth-century trajectory of human rights discourse, the relationship between interwar minority rights and post-World War II human rights, and the relationship between civil rights and human rights have emerged as three major historical problems, and all have bearings on our research dilemmas at Duke. The conference will track the concept of human rights from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the historical transition from natural rights to human rights, to the nexus of terror and human rights in the French Revolution and interwar Europe, and to the intimate relationship between the concept of minority/human rights and the development of international law and institutions.