A history of the international human rights regime from the arab-islamic world
How universal is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The question attracts more debate than one might expect. This research project—UNIVERSALITY—will break new ground in such debates by contributing an innovative Global History of the origins and development of the international Human Rights regime after the Second World War, from the perspective of the (Arabic-speaking) Islamic  world. The Applicant is a junior academic—a graduate of the London School of Economics, Yale University and Harvard University—with unique professional experience as a diplomat beyond Europe, research fluency in the Arabic language, and experience in journalism communicating to non-specialist audiences, all of which this project leverages. The fellowship will be carried out at the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) under the supervision of Professor Sebastian Conrad, one of the foremost practitioners in the project field of Global History. The project deliverables address one of the most pressing historical and social needs for our contemporary multicultural Europe—namely, how we can contribute political histories of the twentieth century that place the agency, experiences and political thought of the non-Western world at the centre of historical action. Through innovative method and using a range of neglected sources, UNIVERSALITY will support this objective through reconstructing a hitherto hidden story of the birth and contestation over the UDHR that can also serve as an alternate origins story for our modern international world. And by foregrounding Arab and Islamic perspectives in debates over the international Human Rights regime, it will offer both academic and public new ways of thinking about how we can include non-Western epistemologies in understanding modern-day processes of globalization and integration.