Description
Book SynopsisThis book challenges traditional accounts of the Third World's contribution to international human rights. It demonstrates that diplomats from Third World countries helped both to radicalize the UN human rights agenda in the heyday of decolonization and to undermine that agenda by advancing cultural relativism as an excuse for abuses in the 1970s.
Trade Review"An important contribution to the historicization and globalization of the human rights debates over the last six decades. . . . Burke belongs to a new generation of historians who are more critical not only of the success rate of the human rights project but also of the motivations behind advocating a particular human rights agenda." *
Human Rights Quarterly *
"In this book, extraordinary for its clarity of argument, crispness of prose, and depth of evidence, Roland Burke successfully challenges the argument that human rights were foisted onto the Third World by Western imperialists at the United Nations." *
American Historical Review *
"Burke's book is a powerful and necessary piece of history as it tears apart some of the myths associated with cultural relativism and the postcolonial politics of human rights." *
Law, Culture, and the Humanities *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Politics of Decolonization and the Evolution of the International Human Rights Project
1. Human Rights and the Birth of the Third World: The Bandung Conference
2. "Transforming the End into the Means": The Third World and the Right to Self-Determination
3. Putting the Stamps Back On: Apartheid, Anticolonialism, and the Accidental Birth of a Universal Right to Petition
4. "It Is Very Fitting": Celebrating Freedom in the Shah's Iran, the First World Conference on Human Rights,Tehran 1968
5. "According to Their Own Norms of Civilization": The Rise of Cultural Relativism and the Decline of Human Rights
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
