Human Rights/Social Rights: The Twentieth-Century Predicament

Organizers: Małgorzata Mazurek (ZZF Potsdam),
Sandrine Kott (Université de Genève), Paul Betts (University of Sussex), Andreas Eckert (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ZZF Potsdam)

Sponsors: Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the ZZF Potsdam



Public keynote lecture: Frederick Cooper (New York University/Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin): 
Social Rights and Sovereignty at the End of Empire: Labour and Economic Development in Decolonizing Africa


Invitation (PDF)

This conference is dedicated to examining the competing traditions and shifting meaning of modern human rights, with a view toward exploring how the idea and understanding of social rights shaped the 20th century political world. In particular the conference addresses the historical origin and nature of social rights over the course of the last century, and how these claims diverged or dovetailed with the broader notion of human rights. The conference brings together a diverse group of international scholars working on the history of (state) socialism, welfare states, international organizations as well as colonialism and post-colonialism, with the aim of discussing how these different lineages related to the larger story of the "century of human rights"

Programme (PDF)

Tagungsbericht (PDF)