(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 8, 2011

(MAHWAH, NJ) “Toward a Critical History of Human Rights: On the Problems of Self-Determination and Territorial Partitions” was the title of a talk delivered by Dr. Eric D. Weitz, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, at a program sponsored by the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide and the History Club of Ramapo College on March 8.

Weitz explored how self-determination and partitions demonstrate the entwining of rights with what we would now label crimes against humanity, notably, the practice of forced deportations of targeted populations and the creation of huge refugee streams.

In order to achieve a more nuanced history of human rights in the contemporary world Weitz pursued the following avenues: 1) an intellectual and political history of the concept of self-determination, and 2) an examination of the post-1945, ethnically-based territorial partitions, namely, India/Pakistan, Jordan/Israel, Rwanda/Burundi. Underlying this approach, as Weitz emphasized, is the presumption that human rights is not a singular thing, but a series of phenomena and concepts replete with tensions and contradictions.

Weitz is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Since 2001 he has also been serving as the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in the College of Liberal Arts. Currently, he is on sabbatical at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University and writing A World Divided: A New Global History from the French Revolution to the Present. The book, under contract to Princeton University Press, is a combined history of human rights and the segmentation of populations in the modern era. His previous books include A Century of Genocide (2003) and Creating German Communism, 1890-1990 (1996), and most recently, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2007), all published by Princeton University Press.

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