Why has 1968 been seen as ‘so bitter a year for human rights’, when this same year saw the explosion of other types of social movement activity?

Diplomatic and UN-focused histories of human rights have shown how the First UN International Conference on Human Rights, held in 1968 in Tehran, became a site for the rehearsal of cultural relativist arguments aimed at limiting the universal pretensions of human rights.

What is cultural relativism, and how did it shape non-state actors’ engagements with human rights?

Cultural relativism is the term used to desribe arguments that oppose universalism by saying that certain particularities are cultural in origin, and therefore are part of the values and belief system of that particular culture.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century cultural relativism shaped the interactions between the global North and what we now refer to as the global South.

For non-state internationalists, the uneven relations between North and South were a key challenge they confronted in their efforts to change the world. These relations were overlaid with numerous social and political factors: the mobilisation of cultural relativism by authortiarian Third World states was one of these.