Human Rights Struggles in Twentieth-century France

Human Rights Struggles in Twentieth-century France PDF Author: Max Likin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303105198X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This book provides an introduction to human rights controversies in twentieth-century France, from the Dreyfus Affair at the beginning of the century, to the arguments over women and immigrants’ rights at its end. Using the Ligue des Droits de L’Homme (LDH) - or the League of the Rights of Man - as a narrative thread for this chronological study, the book tracks the gradual expansion of human rights in France in the wake of the two world wars, the Algerian quagmire and decolonisation more generally. Examining the capital role of the LDH whilst also highlighting the role of individuals and key activists, the book helps us to contextualise the quandaries faced by unseen minorities, particularly colonial subjects and women. The analysis also demonstrates the influence of French human rights activism on key international documents of human rights law, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The LDH occupies a central place in French justice debates and is therefore an ideal template to analyse the rising influence of humanitarianism and crimes against humanity in French causes célèbres from the 1970s onwards. However, the author goes further to look beyond the LDH and even France itself, offering wide-ranging surveys of dominant rights issues across Europe at any given period. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with key members of the LDH, this book provides an accessible overview of human rights struggles in twentieth-century France.

Human Rights Struggles in Twentieth-century France

Human Rights Struggles in Twentieth-century France PDF Author: Max Likin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303105198X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides an introduction to human rights controversies in twentieth-century France, from the Dreyfus Affair at the beginning of the century, to the arguments over women and immigrants’ rights at its end. Using the Ligue des Droits de L’Homme (LDH) - or the League of the Rights of Man - as a narrative thread for this chronological study, the book tracks the gradual expansion of human rights in France in the wake of the two world wars, the Algerian quagmire and decolonisation more generally. Examining the capital role of the LDH whilst also highlighting the role of individuals and key activists, the book helps us to contextualise the quandaries faced by unseen minorities, particularly colonial subjects and women. The analysis also demonstrates the influence of French human rights activism on key international documents of human rights law, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The LDH occupies a central place in French justice debates and is therefore an ideal template to analyse the rising influence of humanitarianism and crimes against humanity in French causes célèbres from the 1970s onwards. However, the author goes further to look beyond the LDH and even France itself, offering wide-ranging surveys of dominant rights issues across Europe at any given period. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with key members of the LDH, this book provides an accessible overview of human rights struggles in twentieth-century France.

Human Rights in the Twentieth Century

Human Rights in the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Has there always been an inalienable 'right to have rights' as part of the human condition, as Hannah Arendt famously argued? The contributions to this volume examine how human rights came to define the bounds of universal morality in the course of the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century. Although human rights are often viewed as a self-evident outcome of this history, the essays collected here make clear that human rights are a relatively recent invention that emerged in contingent and contradictory ways. Focusing on specific instances of their assertion or violation during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in various arenas of global politics, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented. In doing so, this volume captures the state of the art in a field that historians have only recently begun to explore.

Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics

Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics PDF Author: A. Dirk Moses
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108479359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
Leading scholars demonstrate how colonial subjects, national liberation movements, and empires mobilized human rights language to contest self-determination during decolonization.

The Last Utopia

The Last Utopia PDF Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence

Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence PDF Author: Fabian Klose
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812244958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Based on previously inaccessible material from international archives, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence examines the relationship between emerging human rights concepts after 1945 and repressive British and French actions against anticolonial movements in Africa.

Knowing and History

Knowing and History PDF Author: Michael S. Roth
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150174321X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Knowing and History charts the development of Hegelian philosophy of history in France from the 1930s through the postwar period, and critically assesses its significance for an understanding of our cultural present and of the possibilities for making meaning out of change over time. Michael Roth provides detailed analyses of the works of three of the most important Hegelian thinkers: Jean Hyppolite, Alexandre Kojève, and Eric Weil. These philosophers turned to history as the source of truths and criteria of judgment: they forged connections between history and knowing as a means of confronting key modem philosophical problems, and of engaging their contemporary political concerns. By the 1950s, however, they had withdrawn from the historical in search of a more secure, hopeful subject for reflection. According to Roth, the French Hegelians' work illuminates the power and limitations of the philosophical approach to history. Further, he finds in the development of their philosophies one of the crucial transformations in modem intellectual history: the shift from a concern with questions of significance to a concern with questions of use or function. He seeks to explicate the contemporary retreat from questions of significance by situating our cultural moment in relation to its intellectual antecedents. In an Afterword devoted to French post-structuralism, the author discusses Hegel's replacement by Nietzsche as the locus of philosophical authority in France in the 1960s, and examines how this shift informs the work of Michel Foucault. Roth argues that the use of Nietzsche against a dialectical philosophy of history contributes to a serious disjunction between philosophical reflection and political judgment. Relevant to a wide variety of disciplines, Knowing and History will appeal to those specializing in intellectual history and political theory, as well as philosophers of history, critical theorists, and students of modem French thought and culture.

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa PDF Author: Andrew W.M. Smith
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911307746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged. Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 21st Century

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 21st Century PDF Author: Gordon Brown
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783742216
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
The Global Citizenship Commission was convened, under the leadership of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the auspices of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study, to re-examine the spirit and stirring words of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The result – this volume – offers a 21st-century commentary on the original document, furthering the work of human rights and illuminating the ideal of global citizenship. What does it mean for each of us to be members of a global community? Since 1948, the Declaration has stood as a beacon and a standard for a better world. Yet the work of making its ideals real is far from over. Hideous and systemic human rights abuses continue to be perpetrated at an alarming rate around the world. Too many people, particularly those in power, are hostile to human rights or indifferent to their claims. Meanwhile, our global interdependence deepens. Bringing together world leaders and thinkers in the fields of politics, ethics, and philosophy, the Commission set out to develop a common understanding of the meaning of global citizenship – one that arises from basic human rights and empowers every individual in the world. This landmark report affirms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and seeks to renew the 1948 enterprise, and the very ideal of the human family, for our day and generation.

Reimagining Liberation

Reimagining Liberation PDF Author: Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252084751
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging.

Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-century France

Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-century France PDF Author: Kay Chadwick
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9780853239741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Catholicism, once the protean monster, still functions as a complex component of French identity. No consideration of modern France would be complete without reference to the enduring impact and influence of Catholicism on the life of the nation. This volume sets out to capture some of the variety and significance of the Catholic phenomenon in twentieth-century secular France, and to express something of its extraordinary vitality and interest. Each contribution focuses on a specific theme or period crucial to an understanding of the role played by French Catholics and their Church. Collectively, these studies reveal that Catholics were involved in almost every event of consequence and voiced an opinion on almost every issue. Equally, the volume offers a collage of insights which reflects the fragmentation of Catholic activity and attitudes as the century progressed. Being Catholic in modern France no longer means the espousal of a particular political or social agenda. Nor does it necessarily mean regular and traditional religious observance, or even strict adherence to the dictates of the Church. Modern French Catholicism truly has many mansions.