Institute researcher receives prestigious prize

Ever so often, human rights are framed as a Western invention that is being exported globally. But it is less well known that a handful of countries from the Global South played a pivotal role in the human rights breakthrough in the 1960s.

This, however, is researcher Steven L. B. Jensen's main point in his Ph.D. dissertation'Negotiating Universality: The Making of International Human Rights, 1945-1993' for which hehas been awarded the first Ester Boserup Thesis Prize by the Copenhagen Centre for Development Research.

"Ester Boserup’s professional trajectory from the early 1930s through to the 1990s pays testimony to a remarkable life. It is naturally a great honour to receive the Ester Boserup Thesis Prize for 2015. It is also highly motivating for my future research endeavours to receive such recognition," Steven Jensen says.

Developing countries in the driving seat

The Ester Boserup Prize is a prestigious recognition awarded for outstanding social science research on development and economic history. 2015 marks the first year where a thesis is recognised alongside a more established researcher.

The motivation for honouring Steven Jensen hails the dissertation as being groundbreaking:

"Jensen fundamentally re-interprets the history of international human rights in the post-1945 era by documenting how pivotal the Global South was in the breakthrough of human rights in the transformative aftermath of decolonization in the 1960s. This challenges us to rethink just how western the notion of human rights actually is. Jensen’s dissertation is groundbreaking in that it focuses on a core group of states that were leaders in the human rights breakthrough: Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana, the Philippines and Costa Rica".

Research Director at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, is equally pleased.

"Steven's dissertation is, among other reasons, important as it goes to show how important a role developing countries can and should play in the current debate on human rights," Gammeltoft-Hansen explains.

Steven L. B. Jensen's dissertation will be published on Cambridge University Press later this year.