The Cambridge History of Rights: Volume 5, The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

A comprehensive and authoritative examination of rights-making in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Samuel Moyn (Edited by), Meredith Terretta (Edited by)

9781108837316, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 November 2025

648 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 3.4 cm, 0.12 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Human rights & civil liberties law [LNDC]