The Human Rights Dictatorship

Ned Richardson-Little is a Freigeist Fellow at Universität Erfurt, Germany, where he leads a project on international crime and globalization. He received the Fritz Stern dissertation prize from the German Historical Institute Washington and a commendation from the Fraenkel Prize committee at the Wiener Library.

• Introduction. The exploitation of man by man has been abolished!; 1. Creating a human rights dictatorship, 1945–1956; 2. Inventing socialist human rights, 1953–1966; 3. Socialist human rights on the world stage, 1966–1978; 4. The ambiguity of human rights from below, 1968–1982; 5. The rise of dissent and the collapse of socialist human rights, 1980–1989; 6. Revolutions won and lost, 1989–1990; Conclusion. Erasures and rediscoveries.

'In this pioneering book, Richardson-Little upends conventional wisdom that human rights are the natural enemy of authoritarian regimes. With great range and verve, he shows how the East German socialist state used human rights ideologically and diplomatically to stabilize and legitimate its fledging socialist republic, and only in the last decade of the regime did human rights emerge a source of dissent and resistance against the state. This is a model revisionist account of the protean and multi-directional nature of human rights under socialism.' Paul Betts, University of Oxford