WERA IRN Human Rights Education 2021 Webinar Series Seminar 8

In this webinar, Rebecca Adami invites us to look afresh at history and at the historical narratives surrounding the founding of the United Nations and the modern human rights project. She highlights a colonial historical trajectory of human rights that rests on accounts of western agency, with scholarship and teaching leading many to assume that the human rights project is exclusively western in its origins. Such historical narratives overshadow the legacy of Indian and Pakistani freedom fighters and Latin American feminists who negotiated human rights against colonial, patriarchal and racist discourses after World War II. By ignoring their contribution, the UN human rights concept risked reduction to a western trajectory on the ‘Rights of Man’, representing monistic universalism. In the webinar, Adami revisits United Nations history, unearthing historical counternarratives of what a pluralistic universalism of human rights might mean. She presents fresh knowledge and recounts the struggles of postcolonial feminist subjects who brought alternative understandings of rights and means of challenging injustice.

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