ABSTRACT

This essay navigates the shifting nature of postcolonial states’ dissents to the principles set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While people living under colonial rule initially embraced the Declaration enthusiastically in the 1940s and 1950s, much of the newly decolonized world moved away incrementally from the Declaration’s precepts of indivisibility, inherence, and universality. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, newly independent states’ reservations were closely coupled to specific circumstances and framed primarily in terms of practical challenges in realizing particular rights. By the later 1960s, however, Asian, Arab, and African regimes presented arguments containing more profound reservations. Exceptions that were formerly transient and derived from temporary challenges of independence now evolved into more durable claims of economic, historical, and cultural particularism. By 1968 and still more so by 1978, once-reliable custodians of the vision of 1948 had become proponents of radically different variants of human rights. These variants clashed sharply with the human rights discourse advanced by the new wave of human rights nongovernmental organizations that were rapidly gaining prominence in the political West. While these postcolonial contests over human rights language are a well-known theme in the scholarship, this essay is the first to investigate the mechanisms and historical provenance of these Third World dissents.