HINT
Humanity internationalized: cases, dynamics and comparisons (1945-1980)

Period
March 15, 2021 to March 13, 2025
Duration
48 months
Abstract

Humanity internationalized: cases, dynamics, and comparisons (1945-1980) (HINT) is an international project that will scrutinize the ways in which humanitarian and human rights arguments, norms and policies became an institutionalized topic of international affairs, connected to decolonization. This will be done in different chronologies and in relation to distinct colonial and post-colonial geographies and trajectories, considering diverse international institutions (governmental and non-governmental). HINT is based on multiple archives, and is comparative in nature. It will encourage international scientific cooperation, while enhancing the knowledge and competencies of the national scientific system. HINT engages with two of the most important ongoing scholarly debates in international historiography. First, the one about the historical connections between imperial and colonial dynamics, and their markers of coercion, discrimination and inequality, and the internationalization and institutionalization of humanitarian and human rights regimes. Second, the one about the interdependence between the histories of international organizations and of European late colonialism and decolonization. HINT will do so by assessing, in a comparative way, the various dynamics of internationalization of particular events and processes taking place in colonial contexts that shaped the emergence and historical evolution of humanitarian and human rights regimes – distinct but entangled phenomena –, evaluating as well some related post-colonial manifestations. These processes of internationalization were frequently anticolonial in nature, but they also entailed projects of imperial resilience, both sides being duly analyzed by the project. HINT will be empirically and analytically anchored in specific cases that became the object of systematic interest in international organizations.

Researchers
Alanna O'Malley
Ana Guardião
Beatriz Valverde Contreras
Boyd van Dijk
Bradley Simpson
Damiano Matasci
Fabian Klose
José Pedro Monteiro (coord)
Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Nicole Bourbonnais
Steven Jensen
Consultants
Andrew S. Thompson
Bonny Ibhawoh
Emile Chabal
Glenda Sluga
Martin Thomas
Matthias Middell
Meredith Terretta
Roland Burke
Sandrine Kott
Keywords
human rights, humanitarianism, late colonialismo, international institutions
Funding Entity
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology