Leading scholars demonstrate how colonial subjects, national liberation movements, and empires mobilized human rights language to contest self-determination during decolonization.
The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire offers the most comprehensive treatment of the causes, course, and consequences of the collapse of empires in the twentieth century. The volume's contributors convey the global reach of decolonization, analysing the ways in which European, Asian, and African empires disintegrated over the past century.
Human rights activists Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi provide a broad political history of the emergence and development of the human rights movement in the 20th century through the crucible of the United Nations, focusing on the hopes and expectations, concrete power struggles, national rivalries, and bureaucratic politics that molded the international system of human rights law. The book emphasizes the period before and after the creation of the UN, when human rights ideas and proposals were shaped and transformed by the hard-edged realities of power politics and bureaucratic imperatives. It also analyzes the expansion of the human rights framework in response to demands for equitable development after decolonization and organized efforts by women, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups to secure international recognition of their rights.
Do norms of justice, human rights and democracy enable disenfranchised communities? Or do they simply reinforce relations of domination between those who are constituted as dispensers of justice, rights and aid, and those who are coded as receivers? Critical race theorists, feminists and queer and postcolonial theorists confront these questions and offer critical perspectives.
"It presents an alternative perspective on the end of Empire by focusing upon one aspect of constitutional decolonization and the importance of the local legal culture in determining each dependency's constitutional settlement, and provides a series of empirical case studies on the incorporation of human rights instruments into domestic constitutions when negotiated between a state and its dependencies. More generally this book highlights Britain's human rights legacy to its former Empire."--BOOK JACKET.
An innovative diplomatic and intellectual history of decolonization, post-colonial nation building and international human rights and development discourses, this study of the role of the ILO during 1940–70 opens up new perspectives on the significance of international organisations as actors in the history of the 20th century.
Globalization, interdisciplinarity, and the critique of the Eurocentric canon are transforming the theory and practice of human rights. This collection takes up the point of view of the colonized in order to unsettle and supplement the conventional understanding of human rights. Putting together insights coming from Decolonial Thinking, the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL), Radical Black Theory and Subaltern Studies, the authors construct a new history and theory of human rights, and a more comprehensive understanding of international human rights law in the background of modern colonialism and the struggle for global justice. An exercise of dialogical and interdisciplinary thinking, this collection of articles by leading scholars puts into conversation important areas of research on human rights, namely philosophy or theory of human rights, history, and constitutional and international law. This book combines critical consciousness and moral sensibility, and offers methods of interpretation or hermeneutical strategies to advance the project of decolonizing human rights, a veritable tool-box to create new Third-World discourses of human rights.
This book is the first comprehensive account of the International Labour Organization’s 100-year history. At its heart is the concept of global social policy, which encompasses not only social policy in its national and international dimensions, but also development policy, world trade, international migration and human rights. The book focuses on the ILO’s roles as a key player in debates on poverty, social justice, wealth distribution and social mobility subjects and as a global forum for addressing these issues. The study puts in perspective the manifold ways in which the ILO has helped structure these debates and has made – through its standard-setting, technical cooperation and myriad other activities – practical contributions to the world of work and to global social policy.
Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.