Scottish Centre for War Studies and Conflict Archaeology

Dr Sarah Dunstan is a Lecturer in the International History of Modern Human Rights at the University of Glasgow, working with the Scottish Centre for War Studies and Conflict Archaeology. Her research is driven by the desire to understand how 19^th and 20^th century understandings of what it means to be human shaped ideas around human rights and citizenship rights. She looks at this in three specific ways:

• Through the lens of race and gender;

• Through the framework of international relations and international law; and

• Through the history of policy formation.

Her first book, Race, Rights and Reform: Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War, maps collaborations between black activists in Africa, France and the United States over questions of human rights and citizenship from 1919 until 1962. In so doing, it offers a new way of understanding twentieth century thinking about race and rights in the French empire and the United States, as well as in international institutions such as the United Nations.

Her project on “Crises of Man: Crafting Human Rights and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century” explores how key philosophical and cultural understandings of what it meant to be human shaped thinking about citizenship and rights in the international legal sphere at mid-century. Through the frame of a series of ‘crises’ in world order such as the Great Depression and the Second World War, her research questions how ideas about humanity were deployed across the empires of France and Britain, and the world’s emergent “super-power”, the United States, to construct legal categories of citizenship and international human rights law. 

The questions my historical research raises remain pressing in our contemporary moment. Through her work with the Scottish Council on Global Affairs, she works to place this expertise at the service of policy makers.

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First published: 1 March 2022