Thread by @dwebsterhist

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)

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 »

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)