In recent years, the historiography of human rights has expanded, incorporating new perspectives such as women’s rights and neoliberalism, as well as paying more attention to intellectual history, rather than simply describing the institutionalization of human rights. This historiography still focuses in large part on the question of the origins of human rights. Scholars debate whether, for instance, the French Revolution, the international human rights treaties directly after World War II, the Cold War, and the 1970s are the moments when human rights came to be universally shared and implemented.
Paul van Trigt’s monograph Progress from the Margins: Human Rights and Disability Internationalism Since the 1960s is specifically intended as an intervention in this human rights historiography. In every chapter, Van Trigt either builds on, or, more often, takes issue with, human rights historians such as Samuel Moyn and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. In doing so, this book presents a number of important corrections to the current scholarship on the history of human rights, and suggests several new perspectives for future scholarship. Most importantly, Van Trigt argues for the inclusion of the category of disability in the scholarship on human rights and international relations, and for highlighting the voices of disability self-advocates, who have played an important role in putting rights for people with disabilities on the agenda.
The book contains six chapters, each discussing an event, such as a conference or convention on international disability rights, and thus at first sight seems to be chronologically ordered, starting with “Jerusalem 1968” and ending with “Mexico City 2002”. This is, however, more complicated. Each chapter discusses the prehistory and long-term development of one specific aspect of disability rights as mentioned in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) adopted by the UN in 2006. Van Trigt claims this convention launched human rights as “the leading principle for the UN’s disability policy” (p. 33) and recognized people with disabilities as human rights subjects, rather than objects of those rights. The book takes what the author calls a “historicizing approach”, revolving around the study of the main UN documents on disability since the 1960s. The author’s aim was to analyse the concept of human rights, its change over time, and its connection to other concepts. One of the book’s most important arguments is that the journey towards human rights for people with disabilities was an “erratic trajectory” (p. 9) or “a narrative of discontinuous progress from the margins” (p. 2). While being critical of progressivist narratives, still very common in the historiography of human rights, Van Trigt attaches value to the notion of progress to emphasize the major contribution of disabled people to the attainment of human rights.
One of the main narratives in the literature on disability and human rights is the claim that the concept of equality or equal rights came to dominate global disability policies in the 1970s. While this shift from an emphasis on welfare to anti-discrimination and human rights may be true for the Anglo-American disability movement from the 1970s, Van Trigt holds that this official UN narrative of its disability policies is incorrect, or at least incomplete. Before the 1970s the UN mostly advanced development programmes aimed at disability prevention and rehabilitation. Most scholars state that attention to socio-economic inequality decreased after the 1970s, but Van Trigt locates this shift only in the 1990s. More importantly, this book shows that, in practice, social welfare approaches were not so distinct from more individualistic civil rights models. Van Trigt demonstrates that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, global policymakers framed disability as an issue of rehabilitation and development and argues that the presumed shift from welfare to human rights in global disability policy during the 1980s can better be interpreted as a shift to human needs, which was only succeeded by a shift to human rights around 2000.
This implies that what are commonly assumed to be major achievements in the history of disability rights in practice did not focus mainly on human rights. The International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP, 1981), which aimed to integrate disabled people into society, is described by Van Trigt as a “catalytic moment for the ‘speaking out together’ of disabled people all over the world” (p. 58), but it still mainly treated disability as a welfare rather than a human rights issue. Nevertheless, the IYDP changed European policies: whereas integration for a long time had been defined as finding employment and rehabilitation, now integration came to be seen as a broader policy striving towards socio-economic integration and an independent life.
When human rights did become central, in the CRPD, adopted by the UN in 2006 and ratified by many countries, it brought more than just the protection of individual rights of people with disabilities: it used the nation state as an emancipatory instrument, which, according to Van Trigt, is often neglected by scholars who focus on high international politics. Moreover, it brought conceptual novelties: Article 12 coins the notion of “shared personhood”, emphasizing interdependence and the need for structural state support, thus challenging us to conceive of the human subject beyond the rational, independent, and autonomous subject.
Van Trigt takes this reimagining of human relationships, stimulated by thinking about the rights of people with disabilities, one step further in the epilogue – which has a very different character from the rest of the book. Here, the author explores the notion of “utopia” that is often mentioned in histories of human rights. Scholars debate whether human rights since the 1990s have been defined as a “utopia” or as a “bare human minimum”. Van Trigt argues that the CRPD can be regarded as utopian thinking, envisioning a different society, in contrast to the Anglo-American disability movement that fought for individual rights such as independent living and anti-discrimination laws. However, the author suggests, notions such as fraternity may also form building blocks for alternative imaginaries of the human subject and intersubjectivity.
It is exactly these alternative imaginaries of the human in relation to the state and other humans that make this book and its focus on human rights and disability important. Although the continual shifts in chronology, the many quotations from policy documents, and the high number of acronyms of international organizations and conventions do not always make this book easy to read, it certainly stimulates the conversation between institutional approaches to human rights and social and disability history, fields that have too often been separated. The book can also be seen as a stepping stone towards comparative research on intersectionality (one interesting case study discusses the international attention paid to blind women) and the role of the Global South in the development of human rights. Van Trigt suggests future research may study, for example, the role of African actors, or organizations such as the International Labour Organization, in the making of human rights for people with disabilities.
