Rewriting the Past: The Global South in Human Rights History
| Author | Charlotte Steinorth |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12727 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
Rewriting the Past: The Global South in Human
Rights History
Charlotte Steinorth
International Human Rights Scholar
The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s,
Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values by
Steven L. B. Jensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2016. pp. 326pp., £70.99 hardcover 9781107112162, £22.99
paperback 9781107531079
Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of
Global Human Rights Politics by Patrick William Kelly. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press 2018. pp. 334pp., £71.99
hardcover 9781107163249, £21.99 paperback
9781316615119
Such has been the power of post-colonial critiques, that
it is difficult to imagine human rights as anything but a
Western project. Scholarship sceptical of the international
human rights regime has persistently challenged its claim
to universality, pointing in particular to its un-inclusive past.
The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in 1948 when the process of decolonization had not yet
unfolded, was hardly an auspicious time for a magna carta
of mankind. Recent works on the history of human rights,
however, paint a more nuanced picture, highlighting the
role of actors from the Global South in the evolution of
international human rights law and politics. Both Stephen L.
B. Jensen’s book The Making of International Human Rights:
The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global
Values and Patrick William Kelly’s volume Sovereign Emergen-
cies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights
Politics convincingly show the significance of Non-Western
contributions in shaping our understanding of human
rights.
This review article aims to situate the authors’analyses
within human rights scholarship and to reflect with and
beyond the authors on the meaning of the uncovered his-
torical insights for the future of international human rights
and their ability to counter injustice. Before turning to the
historical accounts offered by Jensen and Kelly, however, it
will be helpful to set the scene by outlining the transforma-
tion that research on the history of human rights has been
undergoing in recent years.
New perspectives on the history of human rights:
moving beyond the 1940s
Much of the international human rights literature dealing
with the subject from a historical perspective has focused
on the 1940s, as this was the decade when human rights
entered the global stage through their inclusion in the UN
Charter. Even though the search for the origins of modern
human rights has led some authors to look to much more
distant pasts (Hunt, 2007; Martinez, 2012), for many the
adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in
1948 has marked a founding moment (Glendon, 2001). Cele-
bratory portrayals of the Declaration’s drafting have told the
story of the coming together of a ‘great range of ethical tra-
ditions’in search of a consensus reflecting the essence of all
cultures and religions (Beitz, 2003, p. 36). By contrast, more
critical readings of this event pointed to the lack of cultural
representativeness in the process (Anghie, 2016; An-Na’im,
1990; Mutua, 2001). The fact that many of today’s United
Nations member states from the Global South were still
under colonial rule at the time the Declaration was adopted,
constituted an important limit to its multicultural ambition,
even though the contribution of non-Western scholars in
the UDHR drafting process should not be underestimated
(Anghie, 2016; Liu, 2014).
However, with the publication of Samuel Moyn’sLast Uto-
pia in 2010,fittingly described as an ‘instant classic’(Kosken-
niemi, 2018, fn 13), a new wave of scholarship in the history
of human rights began, which shifted the focus of attention
away from the 1940s to later decades of the 20th Century.
It was through the broadening of the temporal focus in
research, that a more prominent role of countries from the
Global South in the making of international human rights
could emerge. A case in point are the two books under
review which respectively look to the 1960s and 1970s as
breakthrough moments in the construction of human rights
as a global language of justice.
Human rights norm-making in the post-colonial
moment of the 1960s
‘Decolonization transformed the normative backdrop upon
which human rights were projected on the world stage from
the 1940s and the decades that followed’, observes Steven
L.B. Jensen in his introductory chapter (p. 3). He presents the
1960s as the central period for the making of international
human rights. As newly independent countries from the Glo-
bal South joined the United Nations, a cast of new actors
emerged which would significantly shape human rights at the
world organization. Jensen shows how the new composition
of membership had a decisive impact on the codification of
human rights treaties –a project which had been stagnating
Global Policy (2019) 10:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12727 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 3 . September 2019 445
Review Essay
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