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Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2011

DEVIN O. PENDAS
DEVIN O. PENDAS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA; pendas@bc.edu
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Extract

When the late Kenneth Cmiel undertook the first systematic analysis of the emerging historiography of human rights in 2004, he surveyed a field that was ‘refreshingly inchoate’. In the ensuing seven years, the scholarship on the history of human rights has burgeoned considerably. Yet one might still reasonably characterise the field overall as inchoate. Like any new subfield of historical inquiry, there is a clear lack of consensus among leading historians of human rights about even the most elementary contours of the subject. What are human rights? When and where did they emerge? How and why did they spread (if, indeed, they spread at all)? Who were the crucial agents in this history? Few historians working in the field seem to agree in their answers to any of these questions.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 95 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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