American Foreign Policy in the Age of Human Rights

American Foreign Policy in the Age of Human Rights Instructor: Kate Sohasky Department of History Class Hours: Gilman 186, TuTh 10:30-11:45 AM Office Hours: Gilman 346, Tu Noon-2:00 PM; Th Noon-1:00 PM Contact: ksohask1@jhu.edu American Foreign Policy in the Age of Human Rights explores the historical development of modern international human rights through the lens of American foreign policy. Historically, the United States has drawn on human rights narratives as justification for interventions in international affairs and also to construct an image of the United States as a protector and author of human rights. American Foreign Policy in the Age of Human Rights seeks to reexamine the narratives and national myths surrounding human rights in the history of the United States and the world. The course will guide students in critical analysis of existing human rights narratives. The historical relationship between foreign policy and human rights is essential to understanding American history within global context and contextualizing American political action in response to contemporary international issues, including human rights violations, genocide, the construction of borders, and the rights of refugees and immigrants. Lectures and reading material will concentrate on tracing the origins of modern international human rights within United States history. The course will help students to understand human rights as a historical process rather than a universal truth through lectures and critical analysis of primary and secondary texts. In addition, students will further develop their writing and analytical abilities by proposing and producing original research projects. The course is designed for upper-division undergraduates and fulfills the university s writing-intensive requirement. Course Requirements: Students will write an original research paper of a minimum of twenty pages (to fulfill the writing-intensive requirement) on a topic related to the theme of human rights in U.S. foreign policy. In preparation for the research paper, students will submit a three- to four-page analysis of a major primary source related to a topic the student is interested in pursuing as a potential research project. Students will subsequently submit a four- to five-page project proposal and a first draft, in addition to attending a library resource information session. Students will receive written feedback on their work and will also schedule times to meet individually with the instructor to discuss their proposals and first drafts. These individual

2 meetings will count toward the participation grade. The final paper is due on the final exam date scheduled for the course by the University registrar and will take the place of a written exam. Class participation is mandatory and accounts for 30 percent of the final grade for the course. Students are expected to arrive to class on time and be prepared to discuss the assigned readings for each meeting. Class meetings are divided between lecture and discussion time, with thirty-five minutes of class devoted to lecture and forty minutes reserved for discussion. Students will submit all assignments electronically by e-mail to the instructor prior to the start of class on the date due. In the interest of conserving paper, hard copies will not be accepted. Late work will be marked down by one-third of a letter grade for each day that it is late. Grading: Primary Source Analysis: 10% Due end of Week 4 Research Proposal: 10% Due end of week 6 First Draft: 15% Due end of week 11 Final Paper: 35% Due on the course s final exam date Class Participation: 30% Academic Integrity: Undergraduate students enrolled in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences or the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University assume a duty to conduct themselves in a manner appropriate to the University's mission as an institution of higher learning. Students are obliged to refrain from acts which they know, or under circumstances have reason to know, violate the academic integrity of the University. Violations of academic ethics include, but are not limited to: cheating; plagiarism; submitting the same or substantially similar work to satisfy the requirements of more than one course without permission; submitting as one's own the same or substantially similar work of another; knowingly furnishing false information to any agent of the University for inclusion in academic records; falsification, forgery, alteration, destruction or misuse of official University documents or seal. Violations of academic integrity may result in a failing grade for the assignment or course, and may additionally result in further disciplinary action. The complete university academic integrity code may be found online.

3 Statement on Accommodation of Disabilities: If you are a student with a disability or believe you might have a disability that requires accommodations, please contact Dr. Brent Mosser, in Student Disability Services, 385 Garland, (410) 516-4720, studentdisabilityservices@jhu.edu, to obtain a letter specifying any requirements for accommodation in this course. Please notify me of any such requirements in the first week of the semester. Required Reading: Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) Copies of the required books will be available as two-hour course reserves at the Milton S. Eisenhower library. All other readings will be available through the library s electronic reserves system and will be posted to the course website on Blackboard. Class Schedule: I. Introduction to Modern Human Rights Week 1: September 1: The Origins of Modern Human Rights: Creating Historical Narrative No class readings Come prepared to discuss definitions and origins of human rights as we understand them today

4 II. Natural Law and Human Rights Week 2: September 6: Enlightenment Ideology and Liberalism The English Bill of Rights (1689); John Locke, The Second Treatise of the State of Nature (1690) Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), Chapter 1 September 8: The Age of Revolutions: Human Rights in the American and French Revolutions The U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776); The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789); Olympe de Gouge, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008), Introduction and Chapter 3 III. Legal Personhood and the Expansion of State-Protected Rights Week 3: September 13: The Slave Trade, Abolitionism, and Origins of Human Rights Lincoln s First Inaugural Address (1861); The Emancipation Proclamation (1963); Lincoln s Second Inaugural Address (1965) Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Introduction and Chapter 3 September 15: Legal Codification of Rights in the Gilded Age: Emancipation, the Labor Movement, and Suffragettes The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868) Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law, Chapters 7 and 8

5 Week 4: September 20: Rights and Imperialism: The U.S. in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico The Monroe Doctrine (1823); Senator Redfield Proctor s speech on Cuba (1898); The United States Declaration of War on Spain (1898); The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904) Paul Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Chapter 3 September 22: Library Resources Information Session Class will meet at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library **Primary Source Analysis due before the start of class** Week 5: September 27: Imperialism at Home Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), Introduction and Chapter 1 IV. The Impact of World War on Evolving Notions of Human Rights September 29: The First World War, the Creation of the League of Nations, and Isolationism Geneva Protocol (1925); Woodrow Wilson, The Fourteen Points Address (1918) Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2

6 Week 6: October 4: Human Rights in the Context of the Second World War Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Address (1941) Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, Chapters 3 and 4 October 6: The Nuremberg Trials Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, Chapters 7 and 8 **Research proposal due before the start of class** V. The Emergence of Modern Human Rights Institutions Week 7: October 11: The United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, Chapters 9 and 10 October 13: UNESCO UNESCO, Statement on Race (1950); UNESCO, Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences (1951) Perrin Selcer, Beyond the Cephalic Index: Negotiating Politics to Produce UNESCO s Statements on Race, Current Anthropology 53 (2012) Week 8: **Individual meetings with instructor to discuss Research Proposal** October 18: International Civil Rights The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination (1963) Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War, Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Introduction and Chapter 6

7 October 20: Classes meet according to Monday schedule, no class meeting Week 9: October 25: Humanitarianism and the Human Rights Revolution American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (1948) Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), Introduction and Chapter 1 October 27: The Cold War and the Creation of the Third World Cullather, The Hungry World, Chapters 4 and 8 Week 10: November 1: Development Economics, Modernization Theory, and Globalization The United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development (1986) Cullather, The Hungry World, Chapters 9 and 10 November 3: The Population Bomb : Demography and International Human Rights Paul R. Erlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), Chapter 4 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), Chapter 6 and Conclusion

8 Week 11: November 8: Genocide The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951) Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell : America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), Preface and Chapter 10 November 10: Crossing and Constructing Borders: Immigration and Refugees Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), Introduction and Part IV **First draft of paper due before the start of class** Week 12: November 15: Women and Human Rights Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979); Vadana Shiva, Staying Alive: Development, Ecology and Women (1989), Introduction and Chapter 1 VI. Oversight and Enforcement of Modern International Human Rights Week 13: November 17: Jimmy Carter and Human Rights Jimmy Carter s Inaugural Address, January 20, 1977; Jimmy Carter s Address before the United Nations General Assembly, October 4, 1977 David F. Schmitz and Vanessa Walker, Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights: The Development of a Post Cold-War Foreign Policy Diplomatic History 28:1 (January 2004) Thanksgiving break, no class meetings

9 Week 14: **Individual Meetings with instructor to discuss first drafts of research papers** November 29: Human Rights and U.S. Law Jack Goldsmith, International Human Rights Law and the United States Double-Standard Green Bag (1998); Eric Posner, Think Again: International Law, Foreign Policy Online (September 17, 2009) December 1: The Creation of the I.C.C. Excerpts from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), Chapter 5 and Epilogue Week 15: December 6: The 50 th Anniversary of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The State of International Human Rights in Relation to the United States Today David Kennedy, International Human Rights Regime: Still part of the Problem? in Examining Critical Approaches to Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) December 8: Final Class Meeting In-class discussion: The Syrian Civil War refugee crisis **Final Research Papers due on the Final Exam Date for the course**