PhD project
The project examines the work of the East German Committee for Human Rights (KMR), the only state funded human rights committee in the Eastern Bloc that existed from 1959-1990. My dissertation analyzes how human rights propaganda campaigns crafted by the KMR and the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) were deployed internationally, as well as the influence of these campaigns on the creation of an international human rights rhetoric.
The main contention of my dissertation is that through the work of the KMR, the GDR engaged in a purposeful international human rights campaign to assert its sovereignty, curry favor with the Global South, and discredit western states and governments in the international arena. To explore this contention, I focus specifically on a milieu of East German human rights lawyers, many of whom became members of the KMR and in some cases East German UN delegates. This project challenges the existing scholarship by analyzing how the SED and East German lawyers conceived of socialist human rights compared to the West, deployed their arguments and concepts, and ultimately weaponized them against capitalist nations in aid of developing states and themselves.
My research elucidates this tactical use of human rights rhetoric by the KMR and the East German state through the examination of multiple, overlapping historical trajectories during this period including decolonization, increasing global engagement by the GDR, and growing debate and output on human rights from the UN in the form of declarations and covenants. While there is a growing body of literature on East Germany’s global connections, the regime’s use of human rights discourse as an avenue for foreign policy has only recently begun to be explored at length.
