The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Declaration as Disavowal: The Politics of Race and Empire in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Open accessAbstract
This article argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), by claiming certain inheritances from eighteenth-century American and French rights declarations, simultaneously disavowed others, reshaping the genre of the rights declaration in ways amenable to forms of imperial and racial domination. I begin by considering the rights declaration as genre, arguing that later participants can both inherit and disavow aspects of what came before. Then, drawing on original archival research, I consider the drafting of the UDHR, using as an entry point the reception of the NAACP’s Appeal to the World petition, edited by W.E.B. DuBois. I reconstruct conversations within the drafting committee about the right to petition, self-determination, and the right to rebellion, and the separation of the Declaration from the rights covenants, to illustrate the allegiances between US racial politics and French imperial politics, and their legacies for our contemporary conceptions of human rights.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The check wasn’t confident either way, so it gives no verdict — never disputed.
In the citing paper
“According to Ben Gurion, Israel is 'obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state'.10 Ben Gurion informed the Committee that rendering Palestinians politically and morally nameless is inseparable from dispossessing them of their land and sovereignty.”
From Human rights in Palestine: from self-determination to governance (2023) · cites this paper as [10]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 21
- Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic," American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 97-113.
- Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
- Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1969]), 292; see generally chapters 9 and 10.
- Morsink 1999. For that hagiography, see for instance the documents from René Cassin's 1968 Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1968/press.html (last accessed May 8, 2018). French versions in Cassin papers, 382AP152. 20 The reference to 328 years indexes the arrival of slaves in Virginia. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, An Appeal to the World, W.E.B. DuBois, ed. (New York: NAACP, 1947): 6.
- W.E.B. DuBois, The Correspondence of W.E.B. DuBois, Vol. 3: Selections, 1944-1963, ed.
- Herbert Apetheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997): 163.
- For an account of the San Francisco conference, see Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986): 34-8, and Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 63. For the Pan-African Congress petition, see DuBois, Correspondence, Vol. 3, 153-9.
- See Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and
- Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
- In his 1935 article "A Negro Nation Within the Nation," DuBois had also described "a nation within a nation" as both the product of discrimination and as an accomplishment worth striving for, putting greater emphasis on self-improvement as a response. Milton Konvitz, in the third chapter of the petition, also uses the phrase, citing his own 1941 article of the same title, which surveyed the legal construction of an internal nation through the Supreme Court's repeated moves to uphold segregation. W.E.B. DuBois, "A Negro Nation Within the Nation," Current History 42 (June 1935): 265-270.
- See Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, and Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011 [2000]). Also, in the UN archives, see E/CN.4/SR.26, pages 8 onward, E/CN.4/77, page 11, and E/CN.4/77.ADD1. For a reading of this as a defeat for the right to petition, see Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), especially chapter 3.
- See page 8, Position Book for the Second Session of Commission on Human Rights, Geneva, Switzerland, Dec. 1-19, 1947, Book 1. Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 1944, Folder "Geneva Conference, December 1947." A separate set of concerns related to the compatibility of a right to petition with the Logan Act; see "Position Book," page 68, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 1933, Folder Position Book 1947.
- For a strong version of this argument, see Mark Mazower, "The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950," The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 379-398 36 "Article 36," in Book II of "Detailed Comment on the Long Form Declaration of the International Bill of Rights," page 2. Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 1944, Folder "Geneva Conference Book II." 37 René Cassin to Monsieur Parodi, 30 April 1948, page 4, 382AP128.
- See Roland Burke, Decolonization, and Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
- Frederick Cooper, Citizenship Between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014): 41.
- For his role on the Counseil d'Etat, see Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 274-9. For his role at the UN, see 382AP129. 45 Winter and Prost, René Cassin, 276.
- See Glenda Sluga, "René Cassin: Les droits de l'homme and the Universality of Human Rights, 1945-1966," Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 107-124. 47 382AP71. Translations mine.
- Though his emphasis is elsewhere, my story here is consistent with Moyn's more recent claim that discussions of human rights within the wartime French Resistance reflected "Jacobin legacies" -inheritances which would be dropped from the UDHR. Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018): 46-7. 51 Morsink, UDHR, 98. 35
- Roosevelt, "The Promise of Human Rights." 55 Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- Committee on International Social Policy (State Department), "Recommendations with Respect to Specific Articles Formulated by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights at its Second Session in Geneva in December, 1947," pages 1-2.
- See Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals and Eyes Off the Prize, and Plummer, Rising Wind, as well as Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 61 "Droits de l'Homme," 10-11, 382AP128.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Human rights in Palestine: from self-determination to governance
Shalbak, I. (2023) · Australian Journal of Human Rights · doi:10.1080/1323238x.2023.2291210 · Cited by 2
Metadata
- Authors
- Mackinnon, E. S.
- Affiliations
- University of Chicago (US)
- Corresponding author
- Mackinnon, Emma Stone
- Venue
- Political Theory
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2018-06-20
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 57-81
- ISSN
- 0090-5917 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-7476
- OpenAlex
- W2809303713
- Cited by
- 24
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 11
- FWCI
- 67.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Locations
- Political Theory (publishedVersion)
- Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion)
- Apollo
- Funders
- University of Chicago Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
- France Chicago Center
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Law › Legal Rights and Human Rights
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › International Law and Human Rights
- Keywords
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, genre, W. E. B. Du Bois, right to petition, self-determination (international law), racial politics, empire, French imperialism, human rights
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Declaration as Disavowal: The Politics of Race and Empire in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0090591718780697
- The paper
- Mackinnon, E. S. (2019). Declaration as Disavowal: The Politics of Race and Empire in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718780697
