David Webster Profile picture
Sep 1, 2022 9 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Historical case studies show us how #HumanRights have been too often conditional on a "standard of civilization." Some examples...

1. @daviderodogno1 shows this for the 19th C interventions in the Ottoman Empire (Against Massacre, 2012) ImageImage
2. Danilyn Rutherford explores how images of #WestPapua and its people as a remnant of the “Stone Age” enabled the denial of Papuan human rights in the 1960s and since.

Meanwhile, West Papuans have asserted their own equal humanity in such campaigns as “we are not monkeys.” ImageImage
3. Colonial powers deny rights by denying that the colonized are sufficiently “advanced” - sufficiently human - to deserve equal human rights.

Yet the colonized fight back by insisting on rights. Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters tells stories of Six Nations resistance. Image
4. When colonial powers such as France tried to exclude colonies from full human rights protections in the early Cold War, states like the Philippines (an early human rights leader) fought back & made sure rights applied equally & everywhere, a story told in part by Carlos Romulo Image
5. There is a common myth that Western states like Canada were human rights leaders. Yet as Jennifer Tunnicliffe’s Resisting Rights (2019) shows, Canada was a laggard, not a leader. Early Cdn resistance to the Univ Dec of Human Rts echoed into resisting #UNDRIP. ImageImage
6. Human rights debates played out in colonial settings, against reluctance from colonial powers. @Ostrovdoktora study of Human Rights, Development and Decolonization in the Int’l Labour Org’n (2012) shows some of these developments. Image
7. It took *activism* to start changing the resistance to equal rights in places like Canada, as @SBangarth shows in her 2008 book on Japanese-Canadian internment Voices Raised in Protes, or as @jisangster does in her new (2021) Demanding Equality on 100 years of Cdn feminism. Image
8. As Eric Weitz writes in A World Divided (2019), « human rights advances out of a confluence of popular struggles, state interests, & the workings of the international community. » Indeed. And often, as he quotes Mandela saying, « a steady accumulation of a thousand slights » ImageImage
9. Rights expand in the struggle for rights. Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s brilliant framing of the struggle against climate change and loss of Arctic environments as a « right to be cold » (the title of her 2015 book) is an example.

(sorry for posting images sideways) Image

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More from @dwebsterhist

Aug 6, 2022
I've been hired for 2 tenure track jobs and been on multiple committees, sent in more than 100 job applications, and done multiple interviews. Here is my thread 🛢
of job market advice for early career academics based on decades of experience:

1. Get lucky.
2. That's it, really.

The market is not a meritocracy, it is pure chance. The advice threads are well meaning and can help a limited few, but we need to explode this myth that job seekers are at fault and would be hired with a few improvements in their style. That myth harms.
3. By reinforcing the myth of meritocracy and pushing job seekers to do *yet more,* we perpetuate a system that harms, an academic system based on cruelty and exploitation and false promises (less politely, lies). It needs to stop.✋️ We need a collective labour rights approach.
Read 15 tweets
Apr 21, 2022
This term, my university (for reasons I do not criticize) returned to “normal” classes. It has been a heck of term. w/ apologies for rambling, a thread.

Attendance in class this term has been shockingly low - I have never seen anything like it. Students are really struggling…
2. So are university employees at all levels. I worry that trying to do next term as “normal” again is going to be an even bigger struggle for students, teachers and staff. Profs & uni leaders can have enormous compassion & care for our students. But….
3. I feel as if I am teaching a group of students that has been through collective trauma and that we are teaching them in ignorance and could use trauma-informed pedagogy. Accommodations, extensions, but accommodations plus. I think universities have too often failed students….
Read 8 tweets
Oct 1, 2021
Today in 1965, a coup & counter-coup in #Indonesia led to one of the great bloodbaths of the later 20th century. Western governments encouraged mass killings.

Evidence from Canadian archives summarized: davidwebster.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/196…

#cdnfp @ForeignPoli_C
In Flowers in the Wall, Baskara Wardaya provides an exploration of clashing historical narratives of 1965: the official narrative as a wall that blocks light and words, and efforts of non-government voices to break through that wall. Free download at prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/hand…
We can’t understand 1965 without also looking at the global setting & actions of major governments outside Indonesia. In the same book, Bernd Schaefer looks at the roles of the US & China & asks what a 1965 truth commission might look like. Free download prism.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/hand…
Read 20 tweets
Jun 21, 2020
99 years ago, June 20, 1921, the Six Nations (Haudensosaunee or Iroquois) council met with Canadian govt officials to try to stop the erosion of their Grand River land base through Cdn channels. Canada stonewalled & the Six Nations took their appeal global. Thread on the meeting: Image
2. Chaired by local MP John Harrold, the meeting opened with a presentation of Canada's position by the architect of Canada's "Indian policy" Duncan Campbell Scott. The key issue was "enfranchisement." Many Six Nations members fought in WW1 as part of their alliance with Britain. Image
3. Enfranchisement meant that these ex-soldiers & some others could become British subjects (and thus Canadians) by surrendering their status as Six Nations citizens - a loss of people.

It also meant loss of land: the enfranchised could sell reserve lands to Canadians. Image
Read 14 tweets
Apr 17, 2020
The historic Bandung Asian-African conference opened 65 years ago, April 18, 1955. It was one of the 20th C’s most important events.

This e-dossier tells the story of the #Bandung conference through the conference bulletin and additional documents.

historybeyondborders.ca/?p=142 ImageImage
This is an e-dossier of documents intended to be accessible for undergraduate students.

Leaders of the major independent Asian and African countries gathered at this Indonesian city from April 18-22, 1955. There, they first set in motion the concept of South-South solidarity.
Solidarity meant newly-independent countries of Africa and Asia gathering to seek common ground. A French writer dubbed this group “the Third World.” It was at the United Nations where the new independent governments found common ground. It all started in Bandung, 65 years ago.
Read 8 tweets
Aug 29, 2019
Current #WestPapua protests are fueled by Indonesian racism against Papuans. asiatimes.com/2019/08/opinio… That #racism has a history, and it's one reason world powers agreed to hand West Papua to Indonesia in the first place back in the 1960s. Thread.
1960s: one Indonesian writer wanted to “free” Papuans from “stone age civilization” but noted their skills in music & sports; foreign minister wanted Papuans “down out of the trees even if we have to pull them down”; Indonesian president's audience wore blackface at a rally.
A briefing from US president John F Kennedy's national security staff dismissed Papuans as a "stone age" people
Read 13 tweets

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