Bibliographic record
Abstract
A key question in human rights history concerns when human rights originated. Common starting points include Greco-Roman civilization, the early eras of world religions, the French and American Revolutions, and the founding of the United Nations. Taking a very different approach, Moyn (2010) stresses that historians must distinguish between rights and human rights and determine when the former transitioned to the latter, suggesting that this shift took place in the 1970s. This paper agrees with Moyn’s idea that human rights require an international dimension that challenges state sovereignty from without, as opposed to rights and their restriction to the confines of the nation-state. However, it questions his periodization and historians’ tendency to view human rights as emerging in self-contained Western settings. It suggests instead that human rights originated as a concept in the 1890s in response to a crisis of colonial rule in Africa. Specifically, it posits that changing viewpoints of Africa and Africans within the international community made possible by atrocity tales concerning King Leopold II of Belgium’s Congo Free State commenced our human rights age. Birthed by the colonial encounter between Europe and Africa, human rights therefore represent more than the offspring of events, ideas or personalities in ancient or contemporary Western contexts but form part of a shared global heritage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".