Imagining Human Rights

Lora Wildenthal

Imagining Threatened Peoples: The Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker) in 1970s West Germany

The examination of how a human rights organization collectively imagines a wrong, defines its program of work to counteract that wrong, and then sustains that work, is fundamental to writing the history of human rights. Such choices, made in particular contexts, can have long-lasting effects on how people well beyond that organization imagine human rights. This essay concerns the Society’s first decade, the 1970s, and the question of how it then constituted the category of threatened peoples for its West German audience. What did the various cases of threatened peoples have in common, and what made threatened ...