Human Rights: A History of the Present

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

After a brief introduction to early modern theories of natural rights and late 18th-century rights of man, the course will examine the rise to prominence of human rights beginning with the inaugural moment of the early 1940s. It will proceed to examine successive moments of codification (declarations, covenants and conventions), institutionalization (international organizations and NGOs), and instrumentalization (by various political projects from anti-fascism to globalization). The course will explore notions of human rights as they have been defined and redefined in the course of the construction and reconstruction of post-WWII world order, in an attempt to understand how the politics of humanity (rather than of citizenship or class) has emerged as a defining feature of today's world.