Roland Burke

The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom: Human Rights at the Bandung Conference

This article explores the place of human rights at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, a meeting that founded the Third World as a political entity. Contrary to most existing accounts of the conference, which emphasize the anti-colonialism and latent anti-Westernism of the participants, it will argue that there was a significant positive engagement with human rights by a range of newly decolonized states. When recognition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was challenged by Communist China, that document found enthusiastic champions at the conference, including Charles Malik, one of the major figures involved in its creation.

Human Rights Day after the ‘breakthrough’: celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations in 1978 and 1988

This article examines the impact of the late 1970s ‘breakthrough’ in human rights, as it was registered within the United Nations. It analyses the debates on human rights at the thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in December 1978, and those a decade later. These two moments, among the few that invited explicit reflection from states on the meaning of human rights, and of their universality, reveal that the effects of the ‘breakthrough’ arrived at the UN after a long period of latency. Even by 1988, their manifestation was only partial, and often contradictory. The profound gap between the efflorescence in the NGO movement and the depressing stasis, or worse, elsewhere suggests the need for a more complex periodization of the 1970s as an era of decisive triumph in the ascent of human rights.

Flat affect? Revisiting emotion in the historiography of human rights

ABSTRACT Across the preceding 15 years, the study of the post-1945 human rights project has emerged as one of most rapidly developing fields of transnational and international history. This article surveys the current state of the art of emotionalist historiography in the sphere of human rights and humanitarianism. It identifies the value of histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social movements, which have successfully begun to incorporate emotion into their analyses. The historiography of the deeper humanitarian past may well serve as the road to more nuanced histories of contemporary human rights struggles and means for integrating grand-scale political and intellectual history with the interior sentiment of individuals. Through a brief survey of emotion at various moments of the postwar rights story, the article argues that the study of shifting sentiment can substantially enrich accounts of human rights history, as it already has done in other fields.

Real Problems to Discuss: The Congress for Cultural Freedom's Asian and African Expeditions, 1951–1959

Abstract:This article argues for a more careful appraisal of what constituted the “Third World” political and ideological orientation in the early phases of the Cold War, and for greater emphasis on the often neglected liberal democratic strands within early postcolonialism. Its focus is the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and its conferences and affiliated associations in Asia and Africa in the 1950s. The largely neglected story of the CCF’s engagement with the nascent Third World, which began with the earliest years of the organization, revealed an alternative set of voices within the newly independent states: anticolonial, antiracist, but also antitotalitarian, and wary of the perils of state-dominated modernization. By recovering these aspects of the early postcolonial period, it seeks both to moderate the dominant narrative, which privileges nonalignment, and to extend the history of the CCF’s intellectual project, which has generally been approached within an Atlantic and European frame.

‘How Time Flies’: Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1960s

ABSTRACT Recent histories of human rights have identified the 1970s as the most decisive epoch in the birth of the modern rights era. These works have tended toward a parenthetic dismissal of the period 1948–70 as years of interregnum, of marginal impact to the ‘breakthrough’ moment which followed. This article argues for a more complex periodisation, and reclaims the importance of the 1960s. Far from an undifferentiated abyss, the two decades between the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1968 International Human Rights Year held their own shifts, integral to the evolution of modern human rights. A crucial transition in the status of the UDHR occurred across the mid-1960s, roughly aligned with the terminal years of liberal post-colonialism. Through a comparison of two hitherto neglected events in the history of human rights, the fifteenth and twentieth anniversary commemorations of the UDHR, in December 1963 and 1968, this article traces the trajectory of that transition. These commemorations, concentrated moments of explicit reflection on the meaning of human rights, encapsulated the gulf between the early and the late 1960s. In the space of five years, any vestigial consensus on the vision enunciated in 1948 was obliterated.

Disseminating discord and discovering the world: UN advisory services on human rights and the illusory faith in specialist knowledge

ABSTRACT This article seeks to recover lessons of the global seminar series attached to the United Nations Advisory Services in Human Rights initiative. First proposed by the United States in 1953, the seminars flourished across the 1960s. They endeavoured to repartition human rights promotion into technical assistance, seeking a way around political conflict by recourse to experts, technocrats and specialist knowledge. Their origin represented a contradiction – the seminars sought to facilitate expert, ‘technical’ counsel on a concept that was inherently tied to profound ideological divisions. Failure in this setting was predictable, but the seminars themselves were a telling exhibit in the accidental facility for education that came with a roaming internationalism, and the consequent acquisition of interpersonal and experiential knowledge. Disappointing results for their prime aim, a technical road to human rights, were partially offset by the cultivation of a layperson appreciation of human rights and recognition of the limits to expertise. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, and the substantial delta between the sophisticated institutional system of ‘Human Rights’, and the understanding of ‘human rights’ amongst many humans, the inadvertent and decidedly non-specialist successes of advisory services demonstrate the virtues of the prosaic and the intuitive.

Universal Rights, Systemic Violations, and Cultural Relativism in Morocco

The fact that Kurdish socio-cultural codes resist the modern(ist) ideas of state, nation and formal law might explain why the Kurdish community, a ‘stateless nation’, seeks to use ‘another law’, one that is beyond the official legal system and with roots in a non-Western civilization. The Kurds have in effect been constructing their own social reality despite being already settled in the UK (see Chapter 3). However, while the author attempts to create an unorthodox discourse for the study of Kurdish law, it is important to point out that there are problems of consistency when using the Kurdish vernacular. Many Kurdish words are presented in their Turkish equivalent (for example, aksakallılar instead of rûspî, pp. 78–79) or are transliterated into Turkish characters (for example, kirve instead of kırîv, p. 78), despite the fact that elsewhere words are used in accordance with their original Kurdish designation (for example, qelen [dowry payment] which in Turkish would be başlık parası, p. 107). Speaking Kurdish in the public sphere (at school, in court, with government agencies etc.) is one of the important reasons for the struggle between Kurds and the authorities in those countries, especially Turkey, where they are citizens. Therefore, the author needs to be more aware of these language issues, and furthermore the discourse issue. In conclusion, one can easily argue that Latif Tas’s significant book has a strong potential to create academic and public debate on the notions of law, multiculturalism, pluralism, democracy, modernism, liberalism and immigration within the UK, Turkey and Europe. It is hoped that future scholars from various fields such as law, anthropology and cultural studies (even political science) will pursue these academic and public debates using as their starting point the work already provided by Tas through his comprehensive analysis.

Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 287 pp.

Daniel Sargent’s A Superpower Transformed seeks to appraise how U.S. foreign policymakers encountered the epochal ruptures of the 1970s and failed to impart coherence to a discordant and disintegrating international system. This is an intimidating enterprise, one that locates the author at the chronological focal point of current historiographical debate and invites comparison with some of the most eminent historians of U.S. foreign relations. Sargent’s first monograph competes with memoirs and analyses from the very subjects under study—not least the confident and complicated prose of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the multiple volumes of memoirs and reflections by Henry Kissinger. The book is remarkably bold in ambition and still more remarkable for its successful execution. The research is impeccable, with good symmetry across the periods and a mastery of both the core archives and a vast array of secondary literature. Although conventional files of the executive branch and the Department of State stored at presidential libraries and the National Archives are the mainstay, they are supplemented by personal papers from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, documents from various non-governmental organizations, and collections from the United Kingdom. Although many of these materials have begun to be examined, the greatest sphere of novelty is not so much in their recovery as in the manner in which Sargent has approached them. Instead of the thematic, temporally stochastic sampling that historians tend to use when surveying foreign policy briefs and memoranda, Sargent has immersed himself in the sequence, reading all of the daily briefing items in the order they arrived to facilitate the “reconstruction of strategic assumptions” (p. 8). Although no historian escapes teleology, Sargent at least makes a diligent attempt. The value of trying is amply demonstrated in his empathy and appreciation for the dynamism, contingency, and difficulty that hinder any effort to craft strategy. In myriad places, Sargent explains how events thwarted design, which is the central argument of the book, and a pattern that is manifest in his treatment of energy, economic, monetary, military, and humanitarian affairs. Alongside the chosen start point and end point for the book’s core periodization, 1968 and 1979, this technique revitalizes a field of history that has previously seemed to have exhausted any further insight. Less obviously, it produces an account that draws out much greater commonality between U.S. presidential administrations that have otherwise been seen as highly dissimilar. Sargent’s meta-description of strategy across the administrations of Richard

The human rights revolution: an international history

transcript of a public speech from 1950. Schmitz gave this speech in Hanau at a ceremony commemorating the war and German victims of Nazism. While she referred to Jochen Klepper and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, she neglected to mention her own acts of opposition. Indeed, as Gailus demonstrates, Schmitz kept silent about her resistance—for obvious reasons before 1945, but also after the war had ended. That is why someone else could be mistaken for the author of the unsigned memorandum. In Hanau, Elisabeth Schmitz was buried along with her courageous legacy until 2004, when a dusty bag with some of her personal documents, including the handwritten draft of the memorandum, was discovered in a church basement of her hometown.

Challenging the universal declaration: Human rights and the UN advisory services program

This paper examines opposition to the vision for human rights set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its focus is the 1966 seminar on human rights in the developing world, held in Dakar, Senegal. Alongside the expected expressions of support for the Universal Declaration, Dakar also hosted a striking level of hostility toward the rights it contained, challenging the very foundations of universality. The case of the seminar reveals the other side of the often triumphalist history of human rights, and the ways in which transnational collaboration could facilitate the circulation of ideas deeply hostile to individual freedom. This paper has been peer-reviewed.