About Human Rights after 1945
Histories of late twentieth century global change have focused on its perceived winners on a macro-scale: democratic capitalism, global markets and individual rights. In such formulations, the “socialist world” and its history appear irrelevant to understanding global processes and unable to inform liberal Western democratic societies.
The global rise of human rights might look like a particularly striking case in point. The formal guarantees of rights in socialist societies, after all, seemed to have no substantial effect on these societies’ political and legal practices, and the debate on civil society in “the West” which east European human rights activists had inspired during the 1980s, did not survive socialism’s fall in that region.
CALL FOR PAPERS
We welcome papers from different disciplines and from diverse perspectives, whether dealing with official discourses, state policies, right experts, or national or transnational political movements.
We particularly encourage proposals on the following topics:
- rights cultures within socialist societies, including reflections on the global context of their construction;
- the contribution of socialist elites, experts and social groups to the global rise of human rights;
- connections across the socialist world in the production of conceptions of rights, including reflections on the role of international organizations or transnational movements;
- the importance of rights discourses for socialist regimes and movements in establishing legitimacy at home and abroad;
- the use of rights discourses by opposition movements, and the relationship between official/ alternative rights movements within socialist societies;
- the legacy of rights discourses within socialist and post-socialist societies today;
- comparisons, and connections between, the production of rights ideas in the socialist and non-socialist worlds;
- rethinking the role of rights and the collapse of socialist states;
- broader reflections on writing the socialist world into the history of rights;
- broader reflections on how these stories contribute to the rethinking of the story of cultural and political globalization.
This conference is the first in a series of meetings exploring how processes and practices that emerged from the socialist world shaped the re-globalized world of our times. Throughout, the legacies of this socialist engagement with globalising processes in the socialist and post-socialist world will also be an important point of interest.
Please send a brief abstract of 300-500 words, as well as a brief CV, by November 27, 2015, to Natalie Taylor at the University of Exeter (N.H.Taylor@exeter.ac.uk ). All organizational questions can be sent to Natalie Taylor. Academic queries should be sent to Hella Dietz (Hella.Dietz@sowi.uni-goettingen.de ).
Download the Call for Papers: Call for Papers Human Rights after 1945
FUNDING
Substantial funding opportunities for travel and accommodation are available, but we ask that potential contributors also explore funding opportunities at their home institutions.
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