BOOK: Samuel MOYN & Meredith TERRETTA (eds.), The Cambridge History of Rights, vol. V: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries [The Cambridge History of Rights, eds. Nehal BHUTA, Anthony PAGDEN & Mira L. SIEGELBERG] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026), €140,05

 

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Abstract:

The concept of a right, and the idea of human rights, were familiar abstractions on the brink of the twentieth century. But the history of political mobilization since shows that human rights had a transformative capacity in that century that no prior age had demonstrated. Through the twentieth century, human rights became institutionalized internationally in laws, movements, and organizations that transcended state-based citizenship and governance – which irrevocably changed the politics around them. Rights continued to evolve as the imperial world order transitioned to a postcolonial world of sovereign states as a primary form of political organization. Through twenty-six essays from experts around the world demonstrating how this period is historically distinctive, volume five of The Cambridge History of Rights is a comprehensive and authoritative reference for the history of rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Table of contents:

General editor introduction Nehal Bhuta, Anthony Pagden and Mira L. Siegelberg Introduction Samuel Moyn and Meredith Terretta 1. Genealogies and human rights Ben Golder Part I. Rights, Politics and Mobilization Around the World: 2. Women's rights in international politics, 1900 –1967 Jean Quataert deceased 3. Rights and empire Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro 4. Human rights and self-determination Umut Özsu 5. Rights and communism Ned Richardson-Little 6. Regional rights projects and decolonization in the twentieth century Anne-Isabelle Richard and Stella Krepp 7. Hierarchies of rights Barbara Keys 8. Human rights and cold war foreign policy Michael Cotey Morgan Part II. Forms and Fora of Rights Claiming: 9. Visions of human rights Adam Etinson and Jiewuh Song 10. On the critique of rights Jessica Whyte 11. Race, rights and the politics of petitioning Emma Stone Mackinnon 12. Transnational NGOs and human rights Jan Eckel 13. The 1993 world conference on human rights and the new rights ecosystem 14. Transitional justice, legal non-performatives and the sentiments of moving on Kamari Maxine Clarke Part III. Rights Causes and Their Evolution: 15. Rights without subjects: a history of children's human rights Linde Lindkvist 16. Development as the imperialism of 'free' trade: rights, liberalism and the engineering of African economies Alden Young and Tinashe Nyamunda 17. Economic and social human rights in the twentieth century Steven Jensen 18. Christianity, religious rights and decolonization Justin Reynolds 19. (Trans)gender identity and international human rights law Sandra Duffy 20. Resistance and insistence: making postcolonial indigenous rights Miranda Johnson 21. Health Sara Silverstein 22. Human rights and warfare Boyd van Dijk 23. The rights of artificial intelligence Jim Davies 24. Rights and environmental change Kerri Woods 25. Memorialisation, commemoration, and rights Bonny Ibhawoh 26. Empires of real estate: neoliberal legality and the right to housing Brenna Bhandar.

Read more here: DOI 10.1017/9781108938839.