Too often, books on human rights assume that human rights are natural or progressive. They seem unaware that around the world we cannot even agree on the fundamentals of life and death; think of abortion, women’s rights, homosexuality, and the death sentence. This is one of the few books that examine how human rights charters come about.
In this case, the origins are not what we imagine them to be and should encourage us to question whether human rights are, in fact, universal. As the title hints, the origins of the European human rights charter were far from being as progressive as they are assumed to have been today. This book should be required reading for all who are interested in human rights.
The European Court of Human Rights has long held unparalleled sway over questions of human rights violations across continental Europe, Britain, and beyond. Both its supporters and detractors accept the common view that the European human rights system was originally devised as a means of containing communism and fascism after World War II.
In The Conservative Human Rights Revolution, Marco Duranti radically reinterprets the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that conservatives conceived of the treaty not only as a Cold War measure, but also as a vehicle for pursuing a controversial domestic political agenda on…
This book should be given by all wives to their husbands. Better still, before you accept a marriage proposal, ask your fiancé to first read this book.
Packed with anecdotes and facts, it shows in horrifying detail how much of what is assumed to be universal, as in human rights, is merely that which is determined from the perspective of men. Notwithstanding the tone of the title, it is very readable.
Although others may not agree, I do not see it as a ‘feminist’ book but as simply an unpeeling of the layers of the world we live in and exposing to view the extent to which social existence is organised for men invariably at women’s expense.
Winner of the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize
Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives.
For a few brief years following the fall of communism in Russia, the archives were opened to (even) foreign academics.
The result was a wealth of new detail on post-1917 Russia. In 1934 Sergei Kirov, Leningrad party chief and one of Stalin’s favourite ‘sons’, was assassinated. As this book makes clear, it was the work of a disaffected party member and enabled by the deliberately lax security arrangements that Kirov himself sought. However, the murder also served as the pretext for the Great Terror.
The value of the book is not merely in answering the question surrounding the murder itself but in outlining how, over the next 50 years, the findings of all official investigations were determined by the political purpose that the investigation was intended to satisfy. Fascinating.
Drawing on hundreds of newly available, top-secret KGB and party Central Committee documents, historian Matthew E. Lenoe reexamines the 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. Joseph Stalin used the killing as the pretext to unleash the Great Terror that decimated the Communist elite in 1937-1938; these previously unavailable documents raise new questions about whether Stalin himself ordered the murder, a subject of speculation since 1938.
The book includes translations of 125 documents from the various investigations of the Kirov murder, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions about Stalin's involvement in the assassination.
Did you know that Africa has a human rights charter? What does this charter actually mean and what was the question to which it was the answer? My book presents a comprehensive account of the development of the African charter, the first non-Western declaration of human rights, and first statement of an African human rights perspective, and explains why and how it came to be and how it should be understood.
The result is a radical repositioning of the context of the charter as a pivotal document in Africa’s existential struggle of decolonisation against the commanding heights of Western political and cultural universalism, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and not simply a step in the continuum of a so-called universal human rights tradition.
