The Making of International Human Rights
The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values

This book reinterprets the history of international human rights by arguing that the 1960s were crucial to their breakthrough.

Steven L. B. Jensen (Author)

9781107531079, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 February 2017

326 pages, 11 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

'Jensen pursues two aims: to include the 1960s into the historiography on human rights and to highlight the contributions made by a number of states from the Global South, especially Jamaica and Liberia. … Jensen has written a well researched and solid book.' Philipp Kandler, Global Histories: A Student Journal

This book fundamentally reinterprets the history of international human rights in the post-1945 era by documenting how pivotal the Global South was for their breakthrough. In stark contrast to other contemporary human rights historians who have focused almost exclusively on the 1940s and the 1970s - heavily privileging Western agency - Steven L. B. Jensen convincingly argues that it was in the 1960s that universal human rights had their breakthrough. This is a ground-breaking work that places race and religion at the center of these developments and focuses on a core group of states who led the human rights breakthrough, namely Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, and the Philippines. They transformed the norms upon which the international community today is built. Their efforts in the 1960s post-colonial moment laid the foundation - in profound and surprising ways - for the so-called human rights revolution in the 1970s, when Western activists and states began to embrace human rights.

Introduction
1. 'Power carries its own conviction': the early rise and fall of human rights, 1945–60
2. 'The problem of freedom': the United Nations and decolonization, 1960–1
3. From Jamaica with law: the rekindling of international human rights, 1962–7
4. The making of a precedent: racial discrimination and international human rights law, 1962–6
5. 'The hymn of hate': the failed convention on elimination of all forms of religious intolerance, 1962–7
6. 'So bitter a year for human rights': 1968 and the UN International Year for Human Rights
7. 'To cope with the flux of the future': human rights and the Helsinki Final Act, 1962–75
8. The presence of the disappeared, 1968–93
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International humanitarian law [LBBS], International human rights law [LBBR], Human rights [JPVH], Diplomacy [JPSD], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], General & world history [HBG]