Decolonization, self-determination, and the rise of global human rights politics

In 2010, the publication of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia1 took a wrecking ball to the well-established narrative of the global history of human rights – a story of constant progress from the US Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Moyn’s revisionist account centred on the thesis that human rights only emerged as the dominant aspirational framework in the 1970s. They broke through, he argued, only after other utopias failed, like that of self-determination embraced by the anti-colonial actors of previous decades. Edited by historians A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti and Roland Burke, Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global LIBRARIAN’S PICK