Journal for Human Rights: Special Issue on “Human Rights and Violence”

The Journal of Human Rights/Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte (zfmr) is a multidisciplinary quarterly journal, which publishes articles concerning the issues of human rights in English and German. Its aim is to serve as an interdisciplinary forum for the public discussion and social-theoretic reflection of questions of human rights. The journal reaches out especially to scholars working in all fields of political science, history, philosophy, sociology, and legal theory as well as politicians, policy makers and decision makers in politics, economy, and civil society. It seeks to intensive significantly the debate about human rights in political science and in related disciplines and offers wide-ranging approaches to the subject including both theoretic and empirical perspectives.

zfmr

The main objective of the Journal of Human Rights is “to make a significant scholarly contribution to the theory of human rights and enrich and expand discourses about rights in practical political, economic, and social contexts. The journal is committed to the systematic development of the human rights subfield in political science and to the broadening the debate on human rights at all levels.”

Its recent issue focuses on the topic of “Human Rights and Violence” and contains a broad variety of articles from different disciplines. You can have a look at the abstracts of all contributions @:http://www.zeitschriftfuermenschenrechte.de/

In this issue I have published a contribution on the emergence and limits of the human rights regime after 1945 with a special reference to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 in the colonial context. Here is the English abstract of my contribution:

Against the backdrop of the emergence of the international human rights regime and the radicalization of colonial violence in the wars of decolonization after 1945, this essay examines the significance of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 in the colonial context. The main argument is that the leading colonial powers Great Britain and France denied further on the validity of the renewed standards of international humanitarian law in their colonial conflicts and thus challenged significantly the emerging notion of a universal protection of human rights. However, the violent experience of the late colonial wars had also a significant influence on the further development of international humanitarian law as codified in 1977 in the Protocols additional to the Geneva Conventions. Therefore the wars of decolonization can be interpreted in two different ways: on the one hand they became a serious testing ground for the renewed humanitarian standards and revealed the existing legal weak spots; on the other hand they acted as a catalyst for closing the existing loopholes in international humanitarian law.


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