Suchergebnisse

The Rights of the Roma writes Romani struggles for citizenship into the history of human rights in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. If Roma have typically appeared in human rights narratives as victims, Celia Donert here draws on extensive original research in Czech and Slovak archives, sociological and ethnographic studies, and oral histories to foreground Romani activists as subjects and actors. Through a vivid social and political history of Roma in Czechoslovakia, she provides a new interpretation of the history of human rights by highlighting the role of Socialist regimes in constructing social citizenship in postwar Eastern Europe. The post-socialist human rights movement did not spring from the dissident movements of the 1970s, but rather emerged in response to the collapse of socialist citizenship after 1989. A timely study as Europe faces a major refugee crisis which raises questions about the historical roots of nationalist and xenophobic attitudes towards non-citizens

AbstractThis article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth‐century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self‐determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of 'women' as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.

AbstractThis review essay engages with Dorothy Sue Cobble's For The Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality from the perspective of European histories of socialist feminism during the Cold War. The essay suggests three themes that might lead to further discussion. These concern first of all the role of left-Catholic as well as Social Democratic women within the networks that Cobble describes in For the Many; second, the influence of nationalist or other exclusionary discourses on debates about the rights of immigrant workers, and third, the role of social democratic actors in shaping debates about working women's rights in other international organizations - particularly regional organizations such as the EEC/EU. The essay concludes that For the Many is a major contribution to our understanding of transatlantic socialist feminisms in the Cold War world.

AbstractThis Special Issue explores the complicated relationship between women's rights and global socialism during the Cold War. This Introduction describes how the articles deal with this relationship in three, partly overlapping, periods. The first set of articles looks at how the ethos of the Popular Front resonated among women's movements in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, and examines the connections between interwar anti-fascist and anti-imperialist feminisms and those that re-emerged after World War II. The second set of articles focuses on the role and development of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and its model of internationalism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China in the early Cold War. The final articles centre on the challenges faced by the WIDF from the 1960s, exploring issues such as the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, the Portuguese wars of decolonization, and the United Nations Decade for Women (1976–1985). Together with this process of decolonization, this Special Issue also examines how the consequences of postsocialism, in particular for women's rights (the loss of social rights, material security, and substantial challenges to reproductive freedoms), have triggered renewed debates about the history and legacies of communist women's liberation movements in the former socialist world.

AbstractIn May 1951 the Women's International Democratic Federation – a communist-sponsored non-governmental organisation – sent an all-female international commission to investigate the war crimes and atrocities allegedly committed by United Nations forces against civilians during the military occupation of North Korea in late 1950. Communist internationalism has been relatively marginalised in the recent wave of scholarship on internationalism and international organisations. This article uses the Women's International Democratic Federation mission to Korea to analyse how the shifting relationship between communist internationalism, human rights and feminism played out in the 'Third World' during the early Cold War.

"The Legacies of the Roma Genocide in Europe since 1945 explores the legacies of the genocide of Roma in Europe after the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people labelled as 'Gypsies' were persecuted or killed in Nazi Germany and across occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945. In many places, discrimination continued after the war was over. The chapters in this volume ask how these experiences shaped the lives of Romani survivors and their families in eastern and western Europe since 1945. This book will appeal to both researchers and students alike in the history of the Roma Genocide, Nazi Germany, and Modern European History"--

AbstractThis short essay introduces the forum on 'Women's Rights as Human Rights: Global Contestations over the Longue Durée'. It briefly outlines the state of the field, a new agenda for research in the area and the topics of the articles in the forum. The forum derives from a symposium on the same topic sponsored by Gender & History and held at the University of Sheffield in spring 2022.

Gendered critiques by historians and feminist international relations scholars have been animating international history for a good thirty years by complicating the supposedly binary relationships between states and societies, private and public, and local and international that traditionally structured the discipline. In this essay we would like to ask what a sensitivity to gender might add to international histories that are shifting their focus away from intergovernmental relations towards a reassessment of internationalisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through studies of transnational social movements, international organizations and norms, or practices of global governance. We are especially interested in how gender might contribute to a major emerging theme of international history today: the history of internationalism and international organizations as a struggle between competing or converging universalisms – 'imperial and anticolonial, "Eastern" and "Western", old and new' – that sought to speak in the name of all humanity, rather than as the triumph of an international order imposed by the "West" on the rest.

Socialism as Sinnwelt : communist dictatorship and its world of meaning in a cultural-historical perspective / Martin Sabrow -- Neither consent nor opposition : Eigen-Sinn, or, How to make sense of compliance and self-assertion under communist domination / Thomas Lindenberger -- Policeman Nicolae : the story of one man's life and work in the Socialist Republic of Romania (1960-89) / Ciprian Cirniala -- The East German reporting system : normality and legitimacy through bureaucracy / Hedwig Richter -- Late communist elites and the demise of state socialism in Czechoslovakia (1986-1989) / Michal Pullmann -- Local self-governance, voluntary practices, and the Sinnwelt of socialist Velenje / Ana Kladnik -- Modern housekeeping worlds; or, How much is thirty percent really? : Eigensinnige consumer practices and the Hungarian trade union's "washing machine campaign" of 1957-58 / Annina Gagyiova -- Single mothers, lonely children : Polish families, socialist modernity, and the experience of crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s / Barbara Klich-Kluczewska -- "Since Makarenko the time for experiments has passed" : peace, gender, and human rights in East Berlin during the 1980s / Celia Donert -- Problems with progress in late socialist Czechoslovakia : the example Most, North Bohemia / Matĕj Spurný -- Authentic community and autonomous individual : making sense of socialism in late socialist Hungary / Péter Apor -- The "will to publicity" and its publicists : curating the memory of Czechoslovak Samizdat / Jonathan Larson -- Dissident legalism : human rights, socialist legality, and the birth of legal resistance in the 1970s democratic opposition in Czechoslovakia and Poland / Michal Kopeček.

"How did political power function in the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe after 1945? Making Sense of Dictatorship addresses this question with a particular focus on the acquiescent behavior of the majority of the population until, at the end of the 1980s, their rejection of state socialism and its authoritarian world. The authors refer to the concept of Sinnwelt, the way in which groups and individuals made sense of the world around them. The essays focus on the dynamics of everyday life and the extent to which the relationship between citizens and the state was collaborative or antagonistic. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of life in this period, including modernization, consumption and leisure, and the everyday experiences of "ordinary people," single mothers, or those adopting alternative lifestyles. Empirically rich and conceptually original, the essays in this volume suggest new ways to understand how people make sense of everyday life under dictatorial regimes"--