International Conference: Humanitarianism and Charity. Expressions of or Alternatives to Socioeconomic Rights?

Convenors: Fabian Klose (Mainz), Claudia Stein (Warwick), Charles Walton (Warwick)
Venue: Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz
Date: September 28 – 29, 2017
Information: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/research/serhn

Socioeconomic rights have a long but poorly understood history. They are sometimes referred to as ‘second generation rights’, as twentieth-century additions to core civil and political rights stretching back to the European Enlightenment. Yet, socioeconomic rights – such as the right to work and to subsistence – emerged in the political struggles of the French Revolution and have been repeatedly argued for since then. Although most countries in the world have legally recognized them as ‘human rights’ by signing the United Nations’ 1966 International Covenant for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, they tend not to receive the same degree of legitimacy and visibility as civil and political rights.
At this international conference at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, as part of the Leverhulme International Network ‘Rights, Duties and the Politics of Obligation: Socioeconomic Rights in History’, international scholars discuss the history of socioeconomic rights from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In particular, they focus on the complex relationship between a discourse on socioeconomic rights and debates about humanitarianism and charity thus seeking to connect these two important fields of research. In this context the leading questions are: How has humanitarianism and charity figured within the rhetoric of rights? How have the politics of obligation differed between voluntary and rights-based approaches to dealing with socio-economic crises and deprivations? How have states and NGO’s tried to balance providing for urgent needs with the more long-term development of a rights-based approach upheld by the sovereign state?

Program

Thursday, September 28, 2017

2:00pm-2:30pm Fabian Klose (Mainz), Claudia Stein (Warwick), and Charles Walton (Warwick), Welcome and Introduction

2:30-3:30pm Keynote Lecture I:
Michael Barnett (Washington), ‘Humanitarianism and Socio-Economic Rights: Look, But Don’t Touch’

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Prof. Barbara Keys as Senior Research Fellow at the IEG Mainz

Cross-posted from https://hhr.hypotheses.org/1584

Prof. Barbara Keys from the University of Melbourne is staying as Senior Research Fellow in May and June 2017 at the IEG Mainz.

Her research focuses on the area of international human rights, the influence of transnational movements and organizations on international affairs, the role of emotions in history, and the history of sport. Her most recent book, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2014), offers an explanation of the origins of the human rights “boom” of the 1970s in the United States.

Her current projects include a book on anti-torture campaigns since the end of the Second World War and their effects on global human rights movements. Accordingly, she will give a lecture on the topic of “Anti-Torture Campaigns since 1945” on May 30, 2017 at the IEG.

Her first book, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s (Harvard University Press, 2006), is a transnational study of the emergence of international sports competitions as a significant political and cultural force in the 1930s. It won six prizes, including the Myrna Bernath Book Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the best book award of the North American Society for Sport History. She has written several articles and chapters on sports in the Cold War.

You can find and download many of her publications at academia.edu: https://unimelb.academia.edu/BarbaraKeys