Editorial Human Rights in an Age of Populist Authoritarianism

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31273/fd.n8.2025.1993

Abstract

With the founding of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) by the UN in 1948, it appeared that liberal conceptions of human rights were fundamentally embedded in mainstream politics at a global level. This of course had come on the heels of the devastation of two World Wars that had torn to shreds any notion of civilisational superiority of the West. At the same time, decolonization movements across Africa and Asia were challenging Eurocentric notions of ‘the human’ and ‘rights’, and fought for and won a more universal concept of human rights (Sahgal, 2012; also see Sahgal in this issue).

Today, however, the consensus has frayed.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

  • Stephen Cowden, Department of Social Work and Social Care, University of Gloucestershire

    Stephen Cowden is from Melbourne, Australia, and has lived in the UK since 1986. He has been involved in left, anti-racist and trade union activism and he has worked as Social Worker from 1992. From 2001-2020 he taught on the BA and MA Social Work programmes at Coventry University, teaching sociology and ethics. His research is concerned with Social Work ethics, Critical Pedagogy and the Sociology of Multiculturalism and Religious Fundamentalism. In 2013 he published (with Gurnam Singh) Acts of Knowing: Critical Pedagogy In, Against and Beyond the University, In 2020 he took up the post of Academic Lead for Social Work at Ruskin College, Oxford.

  • Gita Sahgal

    Gita Sahgal is a writer and journalist on issues of feminism, fundamentalism, and racism, a director of prize-winning documentary films, and a women’s rights and human rights activist.

  • Amrita Shodhan, Department of History, SOAS, University of London

    Amrita Shodhan is a researcher and historian. Amrita has worked with different feminist and human rights organisations in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Chicago and London for the past thirty odd years. She wishes to put in more time into these commitments. She also teaches part-time at SOAS, University of London and writes about the history of Gujarat and western India.

  • Rashmi Varma, English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick

    Rashmi Varma teaches English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK. She is the author of The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (2011) and of the forthcoming Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India. She has published numerous essays on feminist theory, activism and literature. She lives in London and has been a member of Awaaz-South Asia Watch and Women Against Fundamentalism.

Image 1: Greenbelt (2018) by Malak Mattar

Downloads

Published

2025-07-14

Issue

No. 8 (2025): Human Rights in an Age of Populist Authoritarianism

Section

Editorial

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Stephen Cowden, Gita Sahgal, Amrita Shodhan, Rashmi Varma

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, providing it is not used for commercial purposes and any derivative work is shared with the same license.

- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).