On the Past Uses of Human Rights

Since the mid-2000s, we have experienced an explosion of scholarship on the history of human rights. Many of these studies have been fuelled by the objective of challenging the teleological accounts offered by previous generations of scholars. Some have done so by drawing attention to questions of chronology, questioning our conventional pre-occupation with the Atlantic revolutions of the 18th century and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Others have attacked the implicit Eurocentrism of the field and have called for a more polycentric approach, aiming to unearth the multiple 'histories' of human rights. Yet although most of the recent excursions in the field have been guided by a view of human rights as a contested political concept, very few studies have elaborated on what this actually means. This paper draws on a recent project on the origins of the religious liberty article in the Universal Declaration of 1948 for the purpose of thinking about the relation between concept and context in historical studies of human rights. It suggests that it is not enough to trace how the salience of human rights has varied according to time and place, or how the concept has been wielded for a range of different political purposes in different contexts. Scholars working in the field also have reason to think more closely of how the past uses of human rights have helped to shape our present-day perceptions of the concept and what meanings we may attach to it.