Whereas political and intellectual debates about the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights have received considerable scholarly attention, the intellectual history of international economic and social human rights in the 1950s remains an understudied topic. This chapter investigates this history, zooming in upon Ralph Bunche, Gunnar Myrdal, and Moses Moskowitz, and mapping their main arguments in favor of economic and social human rights. Within the domineering horizon of the global Cold War, they argued in favor of internationalizing economic and social human rights, even if their chances of success, admittedly, looked very slim. It was a human rights advocacy that included a criticism of material inequality. This advocacy flowed from several actors in various parts of the UN – from Bunche’s and Myrdal’s UN leadership positions preoccupied, respectively, with political conflicts and decolonization and economic development, to Moskowitz representing the Jewish minority at the UN and dedicated solely to human rights advocacy. Little noted in the scholarly literature, economic, and social human rights had some degree of salience within the burgeoning discourses on development too.

Iceland and the United Kingdom experienced a series of crises that follow a similar pattern. Iceland extended its maritime limits – to preserve more fish for Icelandic vessels and conserve fish stocks. Britain resisted the extension. Both sides escalated their behavior (e.g., issuing threats and coercively harassing each another’s vessels), and Britain ultimately conceded. This chapter covers the 1971–1973 Cod War. It follows the above pattern, but with a somewhat unique twist. In the 1971–1973 episode, domestic politics within both democratic states encourage escalation. Iceland, moreover, threatens to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to evict United States (US) forces from the Keflavik air base. Because of these threats, as well as escalating coercion, NATO mediates, and NATO and the US pressure Britain to concede. Ultimately, this crisis does not escalate to a major-state war because the disputed issue (i.e., maritime limits) lacks sufficient salience and past, similar episodes demonstrate that a nonwar solution exists.

This chapter nuances the widespread view that human rights became the world’s global morality in the post–Cold War era. Investigating examples from international human rights law and intellectual history, it demonstrates that economic and social human rights did not come to enjoy the same status as civil and political rights. The mid-1970s to the 1980s was a period of frustration for economic and social human rights. Within a few years, hopes for a more egalitarian international world order with international obligations to promote economic and social human rights were shattered. Major factors were the dynamics of postcolonialism, the global Cold War and state power logics, and neoliberalism. Partly as a testimony to this, intellectuals such as Amartya Sen were concerned with basic rights. The post–Global Cold War period was marked by a premature sentiment of human rights triumphalism, though there were important efforts to strengthen economic and social human rights. As witnessed from the backlashes against these rights in the twenty-first century, their wider legitimacy and influence has remained much weaker than their advocates have hoped for.

This chapter analyzes the development of discourses on human rights and on inequality from 1962 until 1974 through the lens of Manouchehr Ganji, an Iranian human rights scholar and UN Special Rapporteur. Where other scholars have examined Ganji’s report The Widening Gap from 1973 with a key focus upon its impact within the UN, this chapter contextualizes the report in three novel ways, bringing in his 1962 doctoral dissertation not previously studied in the research literature; connecting it to how inequality became a major theme in the late 1960s and early 1970s broadly across development discourse, and to how human rights increasingly were deployed to denounce inequality; and, finally, by discussing these developments with regard to recent discussions of the historical relationships between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. Crucially, beyond the singularity of the one individual studied most in this chapter stands a much more general and pertinent point: The human rights project in 1973 was an ambitious anti-inequality project. It was a structural approach to human rights, aiming at undoing deeper within- and between-nation inequalities.

Starting from the evolution of the protection of human rights on the internet, the first part of this chapter analyses the proposals for new digital human rights and the methodology of their creation in different forums such as the Council of Europe and European Union as well as related processes in the United Nations Human Rights Council. The second part focuses on the challenges related to the rapid developments in artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, for the protection of human rights and regulatory efforts by the Council of Europe, in particular its Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law adopted in 2024 and the Artificial Intelligence Act of the European Union dating from the same year. Both instruments are analysed for their potential to protect human and fundamental rights in particular through new digital human rights. The contribution finds possible complementarity between the two regulatory approaches. Giving several examples, it concludes that there is an ongoing process of the concretisation of new digital human rights, which are mainly but not exclusively based on existing human rights.

The chapter discusses the opposition faced by population control advocates within the United Nations from Socialist and Catholic states in the 1940s and 1950s. It outlines early discussions on population issues within the UN, the roles of organizations like UNESCO, FAO, and WHO, and challenges faced by proponents such as Julian Huxley. The document explores debates on overpopulation, humanitarian framings of birth control, and progress in anchoring population discourse in international institutions despite setbacks. It reflects on reframing birth control within a politically complex landscape shaped by the Cold War, decolonization, and economic development agendas. Additionally, the chapter delves into the emergence of interventionist population policies in the 1950s, focusing on initiatives by the Population Council and IPPF. It highlights the humanitarian and human rights arguments used to advocate for population control, discussing conferences and influential figures such as Margaret Sanger and Frederick Osborn in shaping the discourse around population control, eugenics, and individual rights in the Cold War era.

The chapter explores the declaration of contraception as a human right within the United Nations, focusing on key events such as the International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran in 1968. The involvement of transnationally operating NGOs such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council is highlighted. The narrative showcases the shift toward population control as a human right, despite opposition from such entities as the Catholic Church. The chapter delves into the resolutions and debates at the Tehran conference, emphasizing differing perspectives on population control as a human rights issue. It particularly highlights contributions from the opposing blocs in the Cold War and the Communist critique against what Soviet states understood as the fusion of human rights and Neo-Malthusianism. The chapter concludes by discussing a significant transition toward justifying population control programs in terms of human rights rather than just economic necessity, arguing that the fusion of human rights with population control in the 1960s marks a significant turning point in the global discourse on demographic policies and individual rights.

This chapter offers a new way of understanding the workings of the Indian Constituent Assembly. We move beyond studying the script, or the published Constituent Assembly debates, making visible the labour, infrastructure and ideas that went into the staging and the atmospherics of the assembly itself as a public and a lived space. The procedural rituals, the pulse of the debates, and the physical setting of the Constituent Assembly building enabled and shaped the constitution-making process. We follow a few actors from the Constituent Assembly as they moved across different assemblies in India and abroad while the constitution was still in the making. In doing so, we reveal the Indian constitution’s part in an emerging international regime of human rights and practice of comparative constitutional law and reconstruct a sense of the everyday ordinary life of the Assembly, which was deeply connected with the Indian public and the world outside.

Having accomplished its immediate objectives, the spring of 2002 was an ideal moment for the administration to pause and reassess its strategy, goals, and purpose in Afghanistan. Rather than grapple with the newfound complexity, a sense of inertia, drift, and inattention took over. There was, of course, a sense of urgency and a serious debate starting in the spring of 2002, but it was not about Afghanistan. As the year wore on, the administration became almost wholly consumed with preparations for the war in Iraq. Counterintuitively, the drift and inattention could occasionally work to Afghanistan’s benefit. The Bonn Process unfolded as planned and was widely seen as a success with only loose oversight by policymakers in DC and more leadership from the UN. Unfortunately, Bonn would prove to be the easy part. While the political process unfolded, the international community tried, and, absent American leadership, failed to mount the most ambitious reconstruction and stabilization operation since World War II.

Chapter 7 frames Kenyan attempts of archival retrieval as a matter of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels. Importantly, it also draws attention to how the concealment of the “migrated archives” affected political activity not only within Kenya but also in England, as a country undergoing its own re-nationalization process at the end of empire. The process of recovering records from the UK provided the Kenyan Government a framework in which to invoke a sovereign and unified Kenyan polity as the rightful home for the “migrated archives,” while dissent over Kenyatta’s centralized authority grew within the country. Meanwhile, British engagement with the “migrated archives” throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the consolidation of postcolonial archival secrecy with other European partners as evident in the voting blocs formed in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts.

Law-making is not a straightforward process in international law. This chapter focuses on the various law-making processes and structures available for creating international law. It first considers the traditional sources of international law as set out in art 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice generally and the concept of hierarchy of norms and relative norms before considering each of the art 38(1) sources in turn. The chapter concludes by considering alternative sources of international law not covered by art 38(1): 'soft law' including that created by non-State actors, and the role of the UN in creating international law.

Human rights are commonly invoked by States and individuals alike. Most recently there has been a spate of cases with a State accusing another of acts of genocide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) is the first human rights treaty which the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted in 1948. As an example, it gave South Africa the basis for accusing Israel of acts of genocide for their activities against Palestinians living in Gaza even though it had no immediate and direct interest in the situation. Since the Genocide Convention a host of other treaties have been adopted and ratified by States and the United Nations machinery for administering them is now complex and sophisticated, despite the traditional enforcement mechanisms that domestic lawyers are accustomed to having behind them.