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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".