Highly qualified GVPT students may seek permission from the professor and BSOS Advising to take this course for undergraduate credit. The course will count as an elective or CORE Advanced Studies, based on permission from BSOS. Contact GVPT Advising for more information.
Graduate Seminar Description – Spring 2014
History 619G: Histories of Humanitarianism and Human Rights
Starting in the nineteenth century, societies
on both sides of the Atlantic initiated a series of strategies and institutions
designed to provide assistance and humanitarian intervention across the globe.
Rooted in earlier colonial religious missions as well as domestic relief
organizations, these practices constituted what one historian calls “global aid
cultures.” Both religious and secular organizations—the most famous is the
International Red Cross--became international players seeking to rescue,
“save,” relieve and reform designated beneficiary populations beyond their own
borders. As NGOs largely independent of national governments, they acted as
agents of globalization processes that reached an initial highpoint at the end
of the nineteenth century.
Establishing sophisticated transnational
networks as well as a broad variety of supporting measures, these organizations
carried messages of “modernization” to societies in transformation and
assistance in times of crisis, responding to famine and other natural disasters
as well as the ravages of war. At the same time, they allowed individuals--secular
as well as religious--to pursue meaningful careers; this was especially
important for female philanthropists, missionaries, and relief workers whose
own societies often denied them similar vocational opportunities. Working
together, these historical actors instantiated a kind of humanitarian internationalism
at the level of people and organizations, politics and ideas.
Developments in the early twentieth century
challenged earlier global aid cultures in several ways. First, in the wake of
the Great War, the formation of the League of Nations--the world’s first
official intergovernmental entity--transformed the context for international
relief work, while the scale of the crisis produced by the war demanded a new
level of humanitarian response. Second, the organizations themselves were
becoming increasing bureaucratized and professionalized, displacing individuals
who had previously been able to participate on a voluntary basis and
questioning their motivation.
In the wake of World War II, the context for
international assistance shifted once again with yet another escalation in the
scale of humanitarian disaster, the founding of the UN and its affiliated
agencies, the wave of decolonization, and the onset of the Cold War. Yet,
religious arguments for humanitarian practices persisted, and both religious
and secular NGOs remained robust, existing alongside, sometimes cooperating,
sometimes in tension with expanding international organizations. As
humanitarianism became ever more a global enterprise on the part of the world’s
wealthy nations and a tool of their foreign policy, recipient populations began
to mobilize and assert agency in claiming aid and shaping it according to their
own perceptions of need.
The concepts of human rights and humanitarian
are related but distinct, as are their histories. Historians debate the timing
of the emergence of human rights; some argue that their roots extend back to
antiquity, others to the French Revolution, and still others to the emergence
of international organizations such as the UN as well as grassroots movements
in the late twentieth century. This course will examine parallels and
divergences among histories of both human rights and humanitarianism, using a
combination of relevant historiographical materials and primary sources.
Students will have an opportunity to meet
some of the leading scholars in the field at an interdisciplinary,
international two-day workshop on “Histories of Humanitarianism: Religious,
Humanitarian and Political Practices in the Modernizing World,” to take place
at the German Historical Institute, DC and UMD on March 7-8, 2014. In addition
to attending the workshop, students will be expected to engage intensively with
the readings (as indicated by active participation in class discussions) and submit
a historiographical paper on a topic relevant to one of the course themes.
Course readings will include the
following:
Michael Barnett, ed., The Empire of Humanity: A History of
Humanitarianism
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision
for Human Rights
Didier Fassin, Human Reason: A Moral History of the Present
Mary Ann Glendon, The World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Stephen
Hopgood, Endtimes of Human Rights
Akire Iriye
et al., eds. The Human Rights Revolution:
An International History
Micheline
Ishay, The History of Human Right: From
Ancient Times to the Global Era
Micheline
Ishay, ed., The Human Rights Reader
Samuel Moyn,
The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Eleanor Roosevelt, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
