CFP: "Beyond Merchant and Missionary: Samuel Moyn and the quest for a holistic history of Human Rights, 1945-present"

Via H-Net, we have the following Call for Papers: Beyond Merchant and Missionary: Samuel Moyn and the quest for a holistic history of Human Rights, 1945-present. Here's the announcement:

With this conference we are making way for a new, comprehensive and interdisciplinary analysis of Human Rights history (1945-2013). We are bringing together different disciplines, but also renowned academics and talented young professionals. We intend to trigger those who study Human Rights to ask new questions and those who are working in a in an adjacent field to include the concept of Human Rights and the ideas of the Human Rights movement, and to face legal-philosophical complexity in their analysis.

In the last couple of years, in the United States, many books have been published on the post-War history of Human Rights. Especially Samuel Moyn’s contribution has made some challenging points. The modern concept of human rights, he says, differs radically from older claims of rights, like those that arose out of the French Revolution. According to Moyn, human rights in their current form can be traced not to the Enlightenment, nor to the humanitarian impulses of the 19th century nor to the impact of the Holocaust after World War II. Instead, he sees them as dating from the 1970s, exemplified by the efforts of the Carter presidency to make human rights a pillar of United States foreign policy and the Helsinki Accords.

Read more »