100 books like The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature

The idea to adapt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness came from my teaching of modern world history every semester. Later in that course, I would have students read Achebe’s novel as a foil or answer to Heart of Darkness. The Congolese in Heart are barely people: they have no names, and they are only really described by parts of their bodies.

This book presents the West African world–the communities, the customs, the emotions, the families–that colonialism destroys. While it is easy to be swept away by the story’s momentum in the last two dozen pages, take some time early in the novel to enjoy the world that Achebe lovingly paints. I think it is among the most human expressions of fiction you can read.  

I am a historian by day. But I have always believed that artists—whether writers, painters, or musicians—capture the human experience of history and, moreover, convey it in an enduring form for future generations far more effectively than historians. 

Historians have to present a single line of analysis or argument, which inevitably and properly makes events of a particular historical period meaningful to the particular moment in time when they are writing. A true artist can transcend both of those times. In my view, Rushdie’s book achieves that for the period, or generation, after Indian independence in 1947.

I have lived in India and written a lot about Indian history myself, including a book about Bombay, where Rushdie was partly raised. So, I have enjoyed and admired many of his earlier books, but this one remains his great achievement as a work of historical art.

Nobel-prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee is not known for dodging big questions and moral gravitas, and my pick here is no exception.

The Lives of Animals would seem to be the logical choice (and with it, the novel that eventually emerged from it, Elizabeth Costello of 2003). But I’m going with his earlier novel, Disgrace (published the same year as Lives, 1999), because I think it’s the stronger book, and by that I mean more unsettling, more challenging.

Disgrace captures how the most intense and meaningful episodes in our moral lives can nevertheless be opaque and, in a sense, unfathomable. And few books demonstrate in a “show don’t tell” way just how intertwined race, sexuality, and animality are in our moral drama.

This is another novel I enjoy teaching; students respond well to it. Desai excels in giving detailed domestic pictures of life in India. Here she recounts how an ungainly disabled daughter with what seems to be epilepsy and a learning disability is largely kept out of sight by her upper-middle-class family in the 20th century. The daughter, Uma, goes away with assorted other characters, finding a measure of freedom, but invariably needs to return to her parents’ confining house. At the end of the novel, she is largely taking care of them. Desai shows what we might call a “feminist ethic of care” as she writes of a disabled woman as interesting and worthy of sustained attention, which implicitly feeds into advocates’ contention of the value of all disabled people.

This is a collection of short stories by well-known writers—Irvine Welsh and Alex Garland among others—whom The Daily Telegraph newspaper assembled and flew to Africa in 2000, with an open brief to write one short story each; the book’s proceeds went to famine relief. One story in particular, by Telegraph editor W.F. Deedes, resonated in particular with me. The British government, responding to concerns that a UK-based oil company—Phoenix—is contributing to human rights abuses committed in the context of the Sudanese civil war, establishes “A Small Mission of Inquiry” (the title of the story). For most of my diplomatic posting in Sudan (2000-2003), I found myself dealing with strikingly similar allegations against a Canadian company, addressed equivocally by the Canadian government with just such a commission. 

When social scientists began to ask the question – neglected by human rights lawyers and activists – whether international human rights law actually improved the enjoyment of human rights, they came up with largely negative answers: international human rights law had no effect, or very little effect, or was sometimes counter-productive, being associated with more human rights violations, depending on the research methods used. Kathryn Sikkink was among the leading scholars challenging these results, showing that the previous studies greatly oversimplified the human rights world.

Her book, Evidence for Hope, brings together the empirical evidence showing that human rights law sometimes, in some places, improves the enjoyment of some human rights. Sikkink defends the human rights movement from the charge of `utopianism’ by turning the tables on the critics and accusing them of unrealistic expectations for human rights law. The human rights struggle takes place on a hard road… show more.

Jack Snyder addresses one of the most important issues of our times: how to protect human rights.

Based on thorough research, Snyder develops an innovative roadmap for dealing with a broad agenda of human rights issues: impunity from atrocities, dilemmas of free speech in the age of social media, and the entrenched abuses of women and children.

The brutal Russian war on Ukraine further underscores the need for the international community to protect human rights and to punish those who violate them.  

The book is long but it is worth the effort because it is the most comprehensive and approachable book about the origins of our notion of individual autonomy and identity. We take this idea for granted now but Taylor shows how it came about over the centuries in the West. Taylor is a philosopher but he is also alert to the effects of political upheaval and social change. And he is a very important commentator on our current dilemmas, including about human rights, the rights of the community, and the importance of religion.

The author’s perspective on human rights and the process would not be something I would endorse, but it is, nonetheless, to date, the best book on the details of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as it wound its way through the United Nations. 

You always knew you should read Rousseau, but you didn’t. His novel Julie is too long, though eighteenth-century readers did not think so. This book is abstract but if you get beyond that first impression and think like an eighteenth-century person your mind will be blown. At a time when most people listened to the authorities (in church and state), Rousseau started from the simple proposition that anyone could think through the basic issues of social and political life. He takes everything down to first principles and changes everything by making democracy seem thinkable.