Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Samuel Moyn (Yale University, Connecticut) ,  Meredith Terretta (University of Ottawa)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 3.40cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.120kg
ISBN:  

9781108837316

ISBN 10:   110883731
Pages:   648
Publication Date:   27 November 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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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.

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Author Information

Samuel Moyn is Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He is the author of several books, most recently Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Meredith Terretta is Professor of History at the University of Ottawa. Her research on rights, international law, and decolonization appears in Human Rights Quarterly and Law and History Review, among others.

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