Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Research Director at the Center for Research in Contemporary History, Potsdam, Germany, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. He is the author of the prizewinning The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society 1840–1918 (2007). Currently, he is preparing a short history of human rights and a book on Berlin in the wake of World War II.

'Human Rights in the Twentieth Century is a landmark in a field of supreme importance. It is enlightening and therefore disenchanting in the most constructive sense. It brings together a fine group of scholars, mainly historians, to provide historical perspective on a topic that is sorely lacking it and shows the contingency of the deployment of human rights as a political language, the varied roots of that language, and the diversity of objects that it can address.' Donald Bloxham, University of Edinburgh

• Introduction Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann; Part I. The Emergence of Human Rights Regimes: 1. The end of civilization and the rise of human rights: the mid-20th century disjuncture Mark Mazower; 2. The 'human rights revolution' at work: displaced persons in post-war Europe G. Daniel Cohen; 3. Legal diplomacy: law, politics, and the genesis of postwar European human rights Mikael Rask Madsen; Part II. Postwar Universalism and Legal Theory: 4. Personalism, community, and the origins of human rights Samuel Moyn; 5. René Cassin: les droit de l'homme and the universality of human rights, 1945–66 Glenda Sluga; 6. Rudolf Laun and the human rights of Germans in occupied and early West Germany Lora Wildenthal; Part III. Human Rights, State Socialism, and Dissent: 7. Embracing and contesting: the Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–58 Jennifer Amos; 8. Soviet rights-talk in the post-Stalin era Benjamin Nathans; 9. Charter 77 and the Roma: human rights and dissent in socialist Czechoslovakia Celia Donert; Part IV. Genocide, Humanitarianism, and the Limits of Law: 10. Toward world law? Human rights and the failure of the legalist paradigm of war Devin O. Pendas; 11. 'Source of embarrassment': human rights, state of emergency, and the wars of decolonization Fabian Klose; 12. The United Nations, humanitarianism and human rights: war crimes/genocide trials for Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh, 1971–4 A. Dirk Moses; Part V. Human Rights, Sovereignty, and the Global Condition: 13. African nationalists and human rights, 1940s to 1970s Andreas Eckert; 14. The International Labour Organization and the globalization of rights, 1944–70 Daniel Roger Maul; 15. 'Under a magnifying glass': the international human rights campaign against Chile in the 1970s Jan Eckel.