https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/HISU5537?type=COREA master's level course in the history of human rights as the bearer of the claim that what human beings have in common outweighs their differences and that these common needs and obligations should be protected with rights. After a session on precursors of modern human rights, the course will focus exclusively on the post 1948 period and the emergence of universal human rights, alongside the Nuremberg Trials, the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the Refugee Convention. After explaining how these pillars of the new architecture of international law were put into place after 1945, the course explores the role of human rights, during the 1950's and 1960's, in dismantling European imperialism and segregation in the United States. Two classes will be devoted to the role that human rights played in the 'rights revolution' in European and North American societies from the 1960's onwards, focusing upon feminism and gay liberation. A class will consider the role that human rights played in the Eastern European revolutions of the 1980's which overthrew the Soviet Empire. In the post 1989 period, the focus will be upon the revival of humanitarian intervention and the 'responsibility to protect' and conclude in the 21st century with the supposed 'end times of human rights': the apparent exhaustion of human rights and the re-emergence of claims of difference-by nation, race, creed, gender, and class-- that contest the status of universal rights claims.