Human Rights and Revolutions

by Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N.; Grandin, Greg; Hunt, Lynn; Young, Marilyn B.

• ISBN13: 9780742555136
• ISBN10: 0742555135
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-18
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

Now in a revised and updated edition with added original chapters, this acclaimed book provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the complex links between revolutionary struggles and human rights. Covering events as far removed from one another as the English Civil War, the Parisian upheavals of 1789, Latin American independence struggles, and protests in late twentieth-century China, the contributors explore the paradoxes of revolutions that have both helped spur new advances in thinking about human rights and produced regimes that commit a range of abuses. Exploring the changes over time in conceptions of human rights in Western and non-Western contexts, this work offers a unique window into the history of the modern world and a fresh context for understanding today's pressing issues.

Table of Contents

Introduction : human rights and revolutions
Two opening perspectives
The paradoxical origins of human rights	p. 3
The Chinese Revolution and contemporary paradoxes	p. 21
The English, American, and Russian revolutions
Tradition, human rights, and the English Revolution	p. 47
Natural rights in the American Revolution : the American amalgam	p. 65
A European experience : human rights and citizenship in revolutionary Russia	p. 83
Asian and African case studies
An enlightenment for outcasts : some Vietnamese stories	p. 97
India, human rights, and "Asian values"	p. 111
What absence is made of : human rights in Africa	p. 121
A human rights revolution?
(Homo)sexuality, human rights, and revolution in Latin America	p. 139
Ethics and the rearmament of imperialism : the French case	p. 155
The strange case of radical Islam	p. 169
A concluding perspective
Human rights and empire's embrace : a Latin American counterpoint	p. 191
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