Graduate course for highly qualified GVPT undergrads

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

 

Professor Sonya Michel (smichel@umd.edu)      Th 3:30-6 p.m., TLF 2100

 

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