Human Rights Lunch Online: Human Rights in Global and Colonial Contexts: Scandinavia and Beyond

15/11 Mads L. Jensen and Joachim Östlund, both Department of History, will present results from their workshop that revisited the discourses and uses of natural and human rights in the decades around 1800 from the perspective of Scandinavia and its global and colonial contexts. The workshop aim was to chart avenues for further research for global histories of Scandinavian legal and political thought and its interactions with non-European and indigenous legal and political systems.

The workshop “Human rights in global and colonial contexts: Scandinavia and beyond”, funded by the Profile Area Human Rights, took place on 11-12 June 2024. The workshop started from the observation that the last decades of the eighteenth century saw an increasing and explicit use of the concept of “human rights”, theoretically and practically, in Scandinavia. The aim was therefore to chart these still largely unknown waters of the political and theoretical uses of human rights discourses in Scandinavia in its global and colonial contexts. Accordingly, the contributions ranged widely chronologically, geographically and thematically. Together they made it clear that that the history of natural and human rights in Scandinavia has a significant potential for changing the historical narrative of human rights, and much more work needs to be done on this topic.

Read more about the topic in the Human Rights Profile Area blog.