Download or read book The Language of Human Rights in West Germany written by Lora Wildenthal and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights language is abstract and ahistorical because advocates intend human rights to be valid at all times and places. Yet the abstract universality of human rights discourse is a problem for historians, who seek to understand language in a particular time and place. Lora Wildenthal explores the tension between the universal and the historically specific by examining the language of human rights in West Germany between World War II and unification. In the aftermath of Nazism, genocide, and Allied occupation, and amid Cold War and national division, West Germans were especially obliged to confront issues of rights and international law. The Language of Human Rights in West Germany traces the four most important purposes for which West Germans invoked human rights after World War II. Some human rights organizations and advocates sought to critically examine the Nazi past as a form of basic rights education. Others developed arguments for the rights of Germans—especially expellees—who were victims of the Allies. At the same time, human rights were construed in opposition to communism, especially with regard to East Germany. In the 1970s, several movements emerged to mobilize human rights on behalf of foreigners, both far away and inside West Germany. Wildenthal demonstrates that the language of human rights advocates, no matter how international its focus, can be understood more fully when situated in its domestic political context.
Download or read book The Human Rights Dictatorship written by Ned Richardson-Little and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.
Download or read book Germany for Germans written by Maryellen Fullerton and published by Human Rights Watch. This book was released on 1995 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Rights Watch conducts regular, systematic investigations of human rights abuses in some seventy countries around the world. It addresses the human rights practices of governments of all political stripes, of all geopolitical alignments, and of all ethnic and religious persuasions. In internal wars it documents violations by both governments and rebel groups. Human Rights Watch defends freedom of thought and expression, due process and equal protection of the law; it documents and denounces murders, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, exile, censorship and other abuses of internationally recognized human rights.
Download or read book Foreign Front written by Quinn Slobodian and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-21 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreign Front describes the activism that took place in West Germany in the 1960s when more than 10,000 students from Asia, Latin America, and Africa were enrolled in universities there. They served as a spark for local West German students to mobilize and protest the injustices that were occurring wordwide.
Download or read book Human Rights in the Twentieth Century written by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-13 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has there always been an inalienable 'right to have rights' as part of the human condition, as Hannah Arendt famously argued? The contributions to this volume examine how human rights came to define the bounds of universal morality in the course of the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century. Although human rights are often viewed as a self-evident outcome of this history, the essays collected here make clear that human rights are a relatively recent invention that emerged in contingent and contradictory ways. Focusing on specific instances of their assertion or violation during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in various arenas of global politics, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented. In doing so, this volume captures the state of the art in a field that historians have only recently begun to explore.
Download or read book The Human Rights Dictatorship written by Ned Richardson-Little and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.
Download or read book Cold War Germany the Third World and the Global Humanitarian Regime written by Young-sun Hong and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines global humanitarian efforts involving the two German states and Third World liberation movements during the Cold War.
Download or read book World Report 2020 written by Human Rights Watch and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best country-by-country assessment of human rights. The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.
Download or read book Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia written by Jon Piccini and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights in Australia have a contested and controversial history, the nature of which informs popular debates to this day.
Download or read book World Report 2019 written by Human Rights Watch and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 957 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best country-by-country assessment of human rights. The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.
Download or read book The Conservative Human Rights Revolution written by Marco Duranti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconsiders the origins of the European human rights system, arguing that its conservative inventors, foremost among them Winston Churchill, conceived of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as a means of realizing a controversial political agenda and advancing a Christian vision of European identity.
Download or read book The Ambivalence of Good written by Jan Eckel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ambivalence of Good examines the genesis and evolution of international human rights politics since the 1940s. Focusing on key developments such as the shaping of the UN human rights system, decolonization, the rise of Amnesty International, the campaigns against the Pinochet dictatorship, the moral politics of Western governments, or dissidence in Eastern Europe, the book traces how human rights profoundly, if subtly, transformed global affairs. Moving beyond monocausal explanations and narratives prioritizing one particular decade, such as the 1940s or the 1970s, The Ambivalence of Good argues that we need a complex and nuanced interpretation if we want to understand the truly global reach of human rights, and account for the hopes, conflicts, and interventions to which this idea gave rise. Thus, it portrays the story of human rights as polycentric, demonstrating how actors in various locales imbued them with widely different meanings, arguing that the political field evolved in a fitful and discontinuous process. This process was shaped by consequential shifts that emerged from the search for a new world order during the Second World War, decolonization, the desire to introduce a new political morality into world affairs during the 1970s, and the visions of a peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War. Finally, the book stresses that the projects pursued in the name of human rights nonetheless proved highly ambivalent. Self-interest was as strong a driving force as was the desire to help people in need, and while international campaigns often improved the fate of the persecuted, they were equally likely to have counterproductive effects. The Ambivalence of Good provides the first research-based synopsis of the topic and one of the first synthetic studies of a transnational political field (such as population, health, or the environment) during the twentieth century. Based on archival research in six countries, it breaks new empirical ground concerning the history of human rights in the United Nations, of human rights NGOs, of far-flung mobilizations, and of the uses of human rights in state foreign policy.
Download or read book Different Germans Many Germanies written by Konrad H. Jarausch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As much as any other nation, Germany has long been understood in terms of totalizing narratives. For Anglo-American observers in particular, the legacies of two world wars still powerfully define twentieth-century German history, whether through the lens of Nazi-era militarism and racial hatred or the nation’s emergence as a “model” postwar industrial democracy. This volume transcends such common categories, bringing together transatlantic studies that are unburdened by the ideological and methodological constraints of previous generations of scholarship. From American perceptions of the Kaiserreich to the challenges posed by a multicultural Europe, it argues for—and exemplifies—an approach to German Studies that is nuanced, self-reflective, and holistic.
Download or read book The Rights of the Roma written by Celia Donert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rights of the Roma writes Romani struggles for citizenship into the history of human rights in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. If Roma have typically appeared in human rights narratives as victims, Celia Donert here draws on extensive original research in Czech and Slovak archives, sociological and ethnographic studies, and oral histories to foreground Romani activists as subjects and actors. Through a vivid social and political history of Roma in Czechoslovakia, she provides a new interpretation of the history of human rights by highlighting the role of Socialist regimes in constructing social citizenship in postwar Eastern Europe. The post-socialist human rights movement did not spring from the dissident movements of the 1970s, but rather emerged in response to the collapse of socialist citizenship after 1989. A timely study as Europe faces a major refugee crisis which raises questions about the historical roots of nationalist and xenophobic attitudes towards non-citizens.
Download or read book Poland s Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights written by Robert Brier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the historiography of human rights, the 1980s feature as little more than an afterthought to the human rights breakthrough of the previous decade. Through an examination of one of the major actors of recent human rights history – Poland's Solidarity movement – Robert Brier challenges this view. Suppressed in 1981, Poland's Solidarity movement was supported by a surprisingly diverse array of international groups: US Cold Warriors, French left-wing intellectuals, trade unionists, Amnesty International, even Chilean opponents of the Pinochet regime. By unpacking the politics and transnational discourses of these groups, Brier demonstrates how precarious the position of human rights in international politics remained well into the 1980s. More importantly, he shows that human rights were a profoundly political and highly contested language, which actors in East and West adopted to redefine their social and political identities in times of momentous cultural and intellectual change.
Download or read book Militarization and Democracy in West Germany s Border Police 1951 2005 written by David M. Livingstone and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A social history of West Germany's Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS, Federal Border Police) that complicates the telling of the country's history as a straightforward success story. The 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers shows that police violence is still a problem in Western democracies. Floyd's murder prompted some critics to hail the German police as a model of democratic policing that should be emulated. After 1945, Germany's police forces had supposedly shed the militarization and authoritarian impulses still prevalent in other nations' forces. These uncritical appraisals, however, deserve closer analysis. This book is a social history of West Germany's Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS), a federal border guard established in 1951 that became re-unified Germany's first national police force. It argues that the BGS revived authoritarian traditions of militarized policing and kept them alive long into the postwar era even though the country was supposedly consigning these problematic legacies to its past. The BGS was staffed and led by Wehrmacht and SS veterans until the late 1970s, and while West Germany was democratizing, BGS commanders were still planning to fight wars and were teaching its officers "street fighting" tactics. While the end outcome was positive, the study contributes to the growing body of recent research that complicates the writing of the Federal Republic's history as a "success story." Dealing explicitly with post-fascist West Germany's struggle to establish a democratic police force, the book enters a conversation with studies concerned with democratization, security, and Germany's effort to overcome its Nazi past. DAVID M. LIVINGSTONE holds a PhD in History from the University of California-San Diego. He is retired as Chief of Police of Simi Valley, California and is an adjunct professor at California Lutheran University"--
Download or read book Gender in Germany and Beyond written by Jennifer V. Evans and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean Quataert redefined the boundaries of at least five historical fields including European socialism, women’s history and gender history, and international law and human rights. In this volume dedicated to her pioneering work, established and emerging scholars showcase the signature ways in which Quataert, as one of the discipline’s first women’s historians, has influenced how subsequent generations think about history writing as a form of intellectual activism. Gender in Germany and Beyond presents cutting edge historiographical commentary alongside new work which address subjects such as the history of German colonialism and women’s colonial leagues, human rights advocacy during the Cold War, and the complexities of turn of the century gay and lesbian rights organizing.
