The Human Rights Lens: An ISHR Student-Faculty Conversation Series
Please join Professor Joseph Slaughter, ISHR Executive Director with Josephine Koch, UHRP '25, to discuss "Hijacking Human Rights: Neoliberalism, the New Historiography, and the End of the Third World."
Recent histories of human rights identify the 1970s as a "breakthrough" period when they gained traction globally. However, most of the new historiographers adopt a restricted Americo-Eurocentric Perspective that disregards events and peoples in the rest of the world as makers of human rights history. For many in the Global South, the Western "rediscovery" of human rights in the 1970s looks more like retrenchment and repossession, part of a larger "rollback" on Third World agendas to decolonize and reshape the international order. This same period also saw an increased use of airline hijackings as a tactic of national liberation movements, which helped to speed a reversal in the official discourse on "terrorism." Together, these forces facilitated a neoliberal hijacking of human rights that delegitimized national self-determination, narrowed international concern to the plight of individual political prisoners, and realigned the moral economy of human rights.
**This series offers student-led conversations on human rights and social justice issues, examined through the work of ISHR faculty. Participants are asked to read the research in advance. Light lunch will be served.
Registration is required for this event.
Philosophy Hall Room 302
