In the final seminar of the module, we will consider the single most durable institutional outcome of World War II: the inauguration of the United Nations. Our particular focus will be on the humanitarian norms that the UN, and various of its agencies, attempted to articulate and enshrine in international law in the late 1940s. Historians have fiercely debated what this postwar moment meant for world politics and for the history of human rights. Had the atrocious suffering inflicted by belligerents in the 1930s and 1940s yielded a new era in which states would individually and collectively guarantee basic human rights? Or should we regard the UN's founding, and the UN declaration, through a less affirmative lens: great power politics in fancy dress?

Class slides.Link opens in a new window

Required reading:

Primary source: Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/Link opens in a new window

Mark Mazower, 'The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950,' The Historical Journal 47, ii (June 2004): 379-398 [JSTOR]

Mark Philip Bradley, 'Approaching the Universal Declaration of Human RightsLink opens in a new window' in Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde and William I. Hitchcock, The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (OUP, 2012)

Further reading:

Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2005)

Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016) e-book

Kenneth Cmiel, 'The Recent History of Human Rights', American Historical Review 109, i (Feb. 2004): 117-35

Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (eds), Humanitarian Photography: A History (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014) e-book

Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Random House, 2001)

H. Lauterpacht, 'The Universal Declaration of Human Rights', British Yearbook of International Law 25 (1948): 354-81

Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Margaret E McGuinness, 'Peace v Justice: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Modern Origins of the Debate', Diplomatic History 35, 5 (Nov. 2011): 749-68

Johannes Morsink, 'World War Two and the Universal Declaration', Human Rights Quarterly 14 (1993): 357-405

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. Chapter 2, e-book

AW Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (OUP, 2001)