At Lund University, we are embarking on an ambitious journey to create a strong, influential, and globally recognized profile area dedicated to human rights research, education, and outreach. As one of the coordinators of this initiative, I recently had the opportunity to visit the Australian Human Rights Institute (AHRI) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. Supported by an Erasmus+ grant, this visit provided valuable insights into how a well-established human rights institute achieves excellence and impact on a global scale.
Why Compare Lund and UNSW?
UNSW is both larger and higher-ranked than Lund University and AHRI has had more time to mature than the LU Human Rights profile area. These circumstances, together with the significant similarities that our two institutions—and their national contexts—share, make this into a meaningful benchmarking exercise. Both universities operate in countries with high living standards, robust academic traditions, and a commitment to human rights. By examining AHRI’s approach, we can explore how Lund University might further develop its human rights profile to become a leading force for impactful research and collaboration.
The AHRI Model
AHRI has evolved from a small centre into a fully-fledged interdisciplinary research institute, achieving remarkable success since its formal establishment in 2018. With a mission to address human rights challenges and propose actionable solutions, AHRI combines rigorous research with strategic engagement across sectors.
A few key elements stand out in AHRI’s success story:
Stable Funding and Autonomy: Base funding from UNSW provides financial stability, enabling AHRI to actively participate in and lead human rights discussions in Australia.
Robust Administration: A well-built and efficient administrative team oversees communications, project management, partnerships, and events, ensuring smooth and responsive operations.
Support for Research and Students: AHRI nurtures over 200 affiliated researchers across UNSW, provides seed funding promising projects and offering paid internships for students at human rights organizations across Australasia.
A Trusted Authority: AHRI has established itself as the go-to resource for journalists, policymakers, and funders seeking expert advice on human rights issues.
Lessons for Lund University
While Lund University’s organizational structure differs from UNSW’s, AHRI’s approach offers several lessons that can inspire and guide our efforts:
Impact-oriented Research: AHRI excels in translating research into real-world applications. Lund can strengthen its ability to bridge the gap between academic work and societal challenges.
Strategic Partnerships: AHRI’s strategic engagement with government, business, and civil society amplify its reach and influence. Lund should expand its partnerships to achieve similar outcomes.
Raising Visibility: AHRI has mastered the art of engaging with media and policymakers, significantly enhancing its public profile. Adopting similar strategies could elevate Lund’s presence and reputation.
Empowering Students: AHRI’s internship programs equip students with practical experience in human rights, cultivating future leaders and reinforcing the institute’s mission. Lund could create similar opportunities to benefit students and strengthen its impact.
Charting the Path Forward
Fotograf: Johan Persson
With consistent university support, strategic partnerships, heightened visibility, and a steadfast commitment to real-world impact, AHRI has established itself as a pivotal force in advancing human rights discussion in Australia. With similar foundations in place, Lund University’s human rights profile area has the potential to achieve comparable success in the years ahead.
Martin Andersson is a senior lecturer and associate professor at the Department of Economic History at Lund University. He is also assistant coordinator in the Human Rights Profile Area.
Fattigdom och utanförskap i Sveriges digitala ekonomi
Lena Halldenius och Moa Petersén
Nu finns nummer två av Lund Human Rights Reports and Working Papers: Det är en rapport från forskningsprojektet Cash. Mänskliga rättigheter och social hållbarhet i övergången till ett kontantlöst samhälle. Projektet har genomförts av oss, Lena Halldenius och Moa Petersén, med finansiering av forskningsrådet Formas.
Användningen av kontanta pengar minskar och allt fler betalningar görs digitalt. Detta är en global förändring, men den är ovanligt tydlig just i Sverige. Det blir allt vanligare att kollektivtrafiken, affärer och andra serviceställen inte tar emot kontanter som betalningsmedel. Möjligheten att betala räkningar med kontanter över disk är högst begränsad; i stora delar av Sverige finns den inte alls.
Frågan som har undersökts i det här projektet är hur Sveriges digitaliserade ekonomi påverkar de personer som av olika skäl och i varierande grad är beroende av kontanter för att kunna sköta sina betalningar.
Med fokus på Sverige – som har en i hög grad digitaliserad ekonomi – har denna studie syftat till att utforska och lära av de erfarenheter som kontantberoende personer har. Vårt fokus har varit på personer i ekonomisk och social utsatthet, eftersom internationell forskning har identifierat fattigdom som den främsta anledningen till att personer i utvecklade länder som Sverige inte är en del av den digitala ekonomin. Även faktorer som ålder, funktionsnedsättning och osäker migrationsstatus ökar sannolikheten för att man är beroende av att kunna betala kontant.
Under 2022 och 2023 genomförde vi en intervjustudie i Malmö med personer som av socioekonomiska skäl har behov av att kunna betala med kontanter, samt med volontärer och personal vid organisationer som i sin verksamhet kommer i kontakt med personer som är kontantberoende. Deltagarna i studien har delat med sig av sina erfarenheter av hur deras vardag och upplevelser av samhället påverkas av att betalningsmarknaden digitaliseras. I studien betraktas ofrivilligt kontantberoende som en aspekt av digitalt utanförskap och som en rättighetsfråga. Att samhällets grundläggande funktioner – som betalningsmarknaden – digitaliseras på ett sätt som gör att redan utsatta grupper ställs utanför skapar en ny form av ekonomisk orättvisa.
Ur analysen av vårt intervjumaterial framträder tre teman.
Inlåsningseffekt: Personer i kontantberoende riskerar att bli utelåsta från den officiella digitala ekonomin. Men samtidigt blir de instängda i en krympande bubbla av lågprisbutiker och serviceställen som tar emot kontanter, men där många grundläggande ekonomiska transaktioner inte är möjliga att göra. I denna sfär fungerar kontanter närmast som en lokal valuta, separat från samhällets ekonomiska infrastruktur. Detta skapar beroende och integritetsförluster.
Tid och planering: Digitaliseringen påverkar upplevelsen av tid och normaliserar snabbhet och att göra flera saker samtidigt. Personer i kontantberoende och digitalt utanförskap upplever att de inte är synkroniserade i förhållande till samhällets takt och tempo och att deras behov uppfattas som ineffektiva utifrån sociala normer. Utanförskapet gör också att de kortsiktiga strategier som behövs för att klara sig från dag till dag, motverkar de mer långsiktiga strategier (och det risktagande) som krävs för att försöka ta sig ut ur sin situation och försöka bli en del av den officiella ekonomin.
Maktlöshet och konstruerad inkompetens: Ingen av våra kontantberoende deltagare visade någon förväntan om att saker och ting skulle bli lättare eller bättre för dem. De berättar om ångest och stress, om att känna sig dumma och generade. De uttrycker ilska och vanmakt inför banker, myndigheter och andra ansiktslösa krafter som inte verkar bry sig om dem. Deras erfarenhet är också att värdet av val som är viktiga för dem inte erkänns. De finns också en sorg över vad de ser som en förlust av gemenskap och mänsklig kontakt.
Svårigheterna med att betala digitalt är en del av ett större främlingskap inför det digitaliserade samhället i stort och upplevs som en skamlig och nedbrytande social exkludering. Ett viktigt resultat är att kontantberoende är en socialt påtvingad position och en konstruerad inkompetens, till följd av en politiskt och kommersiellt motiverad infrastrukturomvandling. Människor som är beroende av kontanta pengar hamnar i behov av särskilt stöd, inte för att de har förändrats utan för att samhället har förändrats runt omkring dem utan att deras omständigheter, kunskaper och erfarenheter har beaktats.
Den kontantlösa ekonomin är inte en tekniskt betingad företeelse, utan ett politiskt och kommersiellt val. För att politiken på ekonomin och digitaliseringens område inte ytterligare ska missgynna de som redan är utsatta är erfarenheterna av hur det är att leva i kontantberoende i en digitaliserad ekonomi en avgörande kunskapsbas.
Tack till projektets ovärderliga medhjälpare Nanna Malmborg Rasmussen, Elinn Leo Sandberg, Hedvig Halldenius och Amy Kerplunk Mughames.
The big question that all economic historians engage with at one level or another is “why are some countries rich and others still poor”? In search of this answer, the discipline has developed a lot of knowledge on, and methods for exploring, large-scale, long-term, societal-level change over time. Within the Human Rights Profile area, our research group at the Department of Economic History wishes to bring these research questions and methods to the field of human rights.
There is much fertile ground for research in the intersection of economic development, inequality and poverty, with issues of human rights – questions how to ensure that everyone can live in dignity, on food security, on how fruits of growth and transformation are distributed in a society, and on how to guarantee economic rights, etc. Specifically, we are interested in understanding the relationship between socio-economic inequality and human rights. Key questions that we are interested in are whether there are any trade-offs between equality and respect for human rights in certain cases and certain phases; and if so, what these trade-offs and links look like; and also, what can be learnt from this going forward.
The project is currently at an early stage. Through receiving a Seed money-grant from the Human Rights Profile Area (LU) in the fall of 2023, we have made some initial progress. With the seed money, we were able to hire two Master’s Students from the Department of Economic History to produce reviews on the existing knowledge in the intersection of the fields of socio-economic inequality and human rights: Lisa Lehane and Louis Louw. During the spring of 2024, Lisa and Louis produced two excellent reviews on the subject, one literature review of the field, and one review of existing databases on quantitative elements of human rights.
The literature review sets out to map the existing literature in the intersection of human rights and socio-economic inequality. The literature that applies an interdisciplinary approach is rather small, and generally human rights have been a peripheral concern in economic analysis. Some of the key concerns that are highlighted in the review are that part of the difficulty lies in that indicators of socio-economic inequality and human rights are imperfectly conceptualized; and that economists/economic historians and human rights scholars emphasize different aspects of socio-economic inequality.
The quantitative review maps ten existing databases on human rights and socio-economic inequality. Two of these are selected for more in-depth review of their methodologies: analysis into their respective methodologies: the Human Rights Measurement Initiative and the UNU WIDER World Income Inequality database. Some key points to emerge from the quantitative review are that human rights are measured in different ways depending on the rights being analyzed, that only five countries have ratified all 18 human rights treaties, and that individuals living in low socio-economic conditions often are found to be at greater risk of human rights violations. It also specifies many of the challenges of measuring and assessing human rights.
Together, the preparatory studies show that there is ample scope for more research that builds on and clarifies the existing knowledge on the relationship between human rights and inequality. The aim going forward will be to use these two high-quality reviews as a foundation for a grant application. Our hope is that this will lead to the building up of a large database of quantitative indicators for both inequality and human rights, that can contribute to our understanding of this relationship.
Emelie Rohne Till is a researcher at Lund University. Her main research areas concern development economics, approached from an economic history perspective. Within this she focuses on the role of structural transformations and of the agricultural sector in economic development, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.
The workshop “Human rights in global and colonial contexts: Scandinavia and beyond”, funded by the Profile Area Human Rights, took place on 11-12 June 2024. The workshop started from the observation that the last decades of the eighteenth century saw an increasing and explicit use of the concept of “human rights”, theoretically and practically, in Scandinavia. The aim was therefore to chart these still largely unknown waters of the political and theoretical uses of human rights discourses in Scandinavia in its global and colonial contexts. Accordingly, the contributions ranged widely chronologically, geographically and thematically. Together they made it clear that that the history of natural and human rights in Scandinavia has a significant potential for changing the historical narrative of human rights, and much more work needs to be done on this topic.
Recent years have seen significant revisionist work on the history of human rights with substantial implications for our understanding of the foundations (philosophical as well as historical) and the practical and political uses of human rights. Perhaps the most prominent revision has come from Samuel Moyn, who has argued for the distinctive political and legal nature of human rights in the, especially later, twentieth century.[1] This has not only served to sever twentieth century human rights from earlier modern and pre-modern traditions, but like the best genealogical work in modern intellectual history also to bring to the fore alternative political and philosophical human rights conceptions revealing, the limits and weaknesses of current regimes and uses of human rights.[2]
In response, Dan Edelstein has reinscribed the modern history of human rights, from the French Revolution to the UDHR, in the larger tradition of natural law and natural rights in early modern Europe. For Edelstein, the decisive development in the eighteenth century was the physiocrats’ establishment of the “preservationist regime” of natural rights. For Edelstein, this helps explain the enduring significance of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen as a formulation of the “preservationist regime” into the twentieth century.[3] But also reveals that our conceptions of human rights carry with them “metaphysical foundations [that have] only been brushed over, and never fully dealt with”, not least the “theological vision of God as Creator.”[4]
However, Edelstein and much of the recent scholarship on the intellectual history of rights in early modernity, is predominantly anglo- and francocentric focus. Moving beyond this by focusing on Scandinavia, the workshop “Human rights in global and colonial contexts: Scandinavia and beyond” brought out discourses and uses of human rights that developed outside of Britain (including America) and France and, significantly, before the French declaration. In so far as political and intellectual developments in the French revolution were received in Scandinavia, this was against this preexisting intellectual background. Neither Denmark nor Sweden was subject to revolutions, and the workshop contributions outlined some of the distinctive practical concerns and uses of human rights discourse in Scandinavia. This was not least in the context of the global and colonial connections of both Scandinavian monarchies.
One distinctive feature of Scandinavian human rights discourse was that it emerged not out of physiocratic discourse, but out of natural jurisprudence. So, the Copenhagen political propagandist and professor of law and economics, Christian Ulrich Ditlev von Eggers argued in 1796, that “the most recent times” (meaning the last 20 years) had seen the development of a “genuine doctrine” of natural jurisprudence. Moreover, this had informed the great changes and upheavals of his time, such as the American and French revolutions, the great legal reforms, and the abolitions of the slave trade. The intellectual and political changes were global, concerning “the entire race of humankind”.[5]
As formulated in late eighteenth century global and colonial Scandinavia, the discourse of human rights thus entailed universal and global claims. In other words, human rights were seen as pertaining to all human beings, even if the formulation of the concrete contents of human rights, their retention, abrogation, or violation, differed across time and space. Considering the universal import of human rights also in the eighteenth century, it becomes a methodological and historiographical imperative to investigate whether also non-European individuals, groups, and societies laid claim to what amounted to human rights in the long eighteenth century.
To help address these imperatives, we had invited Saliha Belmessous, British Academy Global Professor at Oxford University and a leading expert the political and legal agency of indigenous people in the history of European colonialism, to give the opening lecture. Belmessous outlined a programme for what she termed “indigenous intellectual history”. In particular, she subjected to critique several conceptual and methodological preconceptions that prevent scholars from taking indigenous legalities serious as objects of study. These included eurocentrism and notions of cultural incommensurability, as well as the denigration of indigenous legal orders as mere “customs” on account of their orality.
Drawing on scholars such as Katherine A. Hermes and Tamar Herzog, Belmessous suggested the reconstruction of indigenous legal ideas, including rights, from their political and legal practice, not least in their contestation of European colonialism.[6] Proceeding from the analysis of oral, written, and material forms of indigenous law within the colonial archive, this programme eschews essentialising preconceptions of indigenous legal cultures as incommensurable with European legal ideas, including those of human rights. For our purpose here, the focus must be empirical investigations of whether non-European actors made claims that corresponded to human rights as conceptualised at the time, and whether they were recognised as such.
Much of the workshop accordingly concerned the uses of natural and human rights discourse in the context of Scandinavian connections with the rest of the world. Sessions included papers dealing with both Scandinavian and non-Scandinavian discussions of rights. The first session focused on the issue of slavery and slave trade in the Atlantic. Johan Olsthoorn (Amsterdam) discussed the writings of the antislavery theorist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791), born in what is today’s Ghana. Olsthoorn argued that natural rights played a key role in Cugoano’s construal of slavery and the slave trade as robbing the enslaved of their “natural rights as men”. On a similar theme and geography, Mads L. Jensen (Lund) argued that notions of natural rights, and particularly human rights, informed the moral and political criticism of the slave trade that led to the 1792 decree abolishing the Danish slave trade. At the same time, however, a discourse of human rights came to justify increasing Danish colonialism in West Africa.
The second session turned to the uses of human rights in political and economic reforms in Denmark in the decades around 1800. Markus Hansen (Lund) discussed how early proponents of agrarian reform, notably the abolition of peasant servitude, saw the manorial system as depriving the peasants of their natural, human rights. The restitution of these rights required thoroughgoing reforms, as effected in the Danish agrarian laws of 1788. Simen Hegdalstrand (KCL/Oslo) discussed the “Literary Jewish Feud”, a debate that ushered in the decision to emancipate Danish Jews in March 1814. Hegdalstrand argued that Jewish authors invoked a discourse of rights, and that discourses of patriotism remained current in both sides of the debate.
Session three turned to Swedish connections to the Mediterranean and the far north. Joachim Östlund (Lund) discussed a proposal for the regulation of the Mediterranean slave trade, which the Moroccan Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah al-Khatib presented to the Scandinavian monarchies in 1777. Situating this against the background of earlier uses of natural rights to conceptualise Scandinavian-Moroccan relations and treaties, Östlund highlighted a North African perspective on contemporary discussions of slave trade. In a very different geographical context, Andreas Hellerstedt (Sundsvall) discussed how notions of natural law and natural rights informed Swedish thinking about the colonisation of Sápmi in Northern Scandinavia. This concerned not least the status of the natural rights of the Sámi under the Swedish Crown.
Session four turned to the Swedish and the French Caribbean. Romain Cuttat (Geneve) discussed how the Swiss natural jurist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui influenced the Swedish King Gustav III, and particularly the purchase and annexation of Saint-Barthélemy in 1784 as a hub for slave trade and plantation slavery. Carl Wilén (Lund) presented the concept of “movement text” as central in the investigation of the uses of human rights discourse in the Haitian revolution. This reveals not just a hitherto largely disregarded group of actors as formulators and claimants of human rights in the revolution, but also the importance of social rights claims.
The workshop highlighted several directions for research on the history of human rights in global Scandinavia. One concerns the theoretical (philosophical and theological) foundations for thinking about human rights, which differed greatly within Scandinavia. This was also the case for thinkers drawing on natural jurisprudence. One key influence was Kantianism, but another equally influential was cameralism. In other words, there were different, rival philosophical and metaphysical foundations for human rights, tending either to secularisation or resacralisation. This had consequences not just for which natural rights were reconceptualised as human rights, but also for their political and legal significance.[7]
Another direction concerns precisely what human rights were invoked, by whom, and for what purpose. This concerns the practical codification and contestation of human rights in treaties, proclamations and declarations. As both the Haitian movement texts and the Scandinavian discussions of slavery and agrarian reform illustrate, social, rather than constitutional, issues were often at the fore in claims to human rights, notably by less privileged actors, including women. Following Saliha Belmessous’ proposal, this should also investigate how rights claims were made by and for colonial subjects in the Scandinavian colonies in Greenland, India, Africa, West Indies, and by other actors contesting Scandinavian colonialism.
These directions will be pursued in a special issue planned for Global Intellectual History, and in workshops organised in 2025 with Nicolai von Eggers (Copenhagen) and funded by Einar Hansen’s Foundation.
[1] Especially Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History: Expanded Second Edition (London: Verso, 2017); Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018).
[2] For an influential formulation of the use of genealogy within modern intellectual history, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). This is revisited in Hannah Dawson and Annelien de Dijn, eds., Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[3] Dan Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).
[4] Dan Edelstein, ‘Spirit of Rights. Response to Comments’, Opera Historica 21, no. 1 (30 March 2020): 112, https://doi.org/10.32725/oph.2020.008.
[5] Christian Ulrich Detlev von Eggers, Institutiones juris civitatis publici et gentium universalis (Copenhagen: Proft & Storch, 1796), 40–42.
[6] See e.g. Katherine A. Hermes, ‘“‘Justice Will Be Done Us’: Alqonquian Demands for Reciprocity in the Courts of European Settlers”’, in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. C. L. Tomlins and B. H. Mann (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 123–49; Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1287grm.
[7] For cameralist thinking on human rights in Germany before the French Revolution, see Diethelm Klippel, ‘Die Diskussion der Menschenrechte am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland’, Gießener Universitätsblätter 2 (1990): 29–40.
Watch the recording of Brittis Edman´s presentation about “Human rights of older persons in long-term care”:
The Human Rights Lunch Online on the 25th of October was a special collaboration between the two Lund University profile areas Human Rights and Proactive Ageing, together with The Swedish Institute for Human Rights.
Brittis Edman, project leader, presented the latest report of The Swedish Institute for Human Rights ”Home is somewhere else – a study on the human rights of older persons in long-term care”.
About the report:
Older persons living in residential care homes have shared their experiences with the Swedish Institute for Human Rights. They describe the move into long-term care in terms of a major change and as a loss of the life they led before. For many of them, it has taken time to adjust to their new situation.
In the report ‘Hemma är någon annanstans’ (Home is somewhere else), older persons living in residential care homes share their experiences and perceptions of how a selection of human rights are protected and respected in their everyday lives. Based on their observations, the Swedish Institute for Human Rights have analysed how these rights are realised in both law and practice. The human rights the report focuses on are the right to dignity, the right to participation and social inclusion, the right to privacy and family life, and the right to equality and non-discrimination. This report, which is the Institute for Human Rights’ first in-depth thematic study, reveals a disparate situation. The staff the Institute met within the residential care system were committed and knowledgeable, and many older persons in residential care homes were satisfied with the care and service they receive. Despite this, however, the Institute have been able to identify clear inadequacies from a human rights perspective:
Ageism normalises shortcomings in the care of older persons.
The human rights perspective within the care of older persons is weak.
Knowledge of human rights and what they mean in practice is low.
Opportunities for older persons’ participation, self-determination and empowerment are limited.
Based on the report´s conclusions, the Swedish Institute for Human Rights has drawn up a series of recommendations to the government and municipalities which would strengthen the safe-guarding of older persons’ human rights in care settings.
The report is based on information gathered through desk research, a legal analysis and field work within which the Swedish Institute for Human Rights interviewed around 50 people: older persons, managers and care staff in eight specialised care homes for older persons in Sweden. This included two municipalities in the north, two in central parts of the country and two in the south.
About the The Swedish Institute for Human Rights
The purpose of the Swedish Institute for Human Rights is to promote and protect human rights in Sweden. Included in this task is also the promotion, protection, and monitoring of the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Tasks and responsibilities
The Swedish Institute for Human Rights is a Swedish national agency which was formally established in January 2022 in accordance with the Swedish Act on the Institute for Human Rights (2021:642). The purpose of the Institute is, according to the legislative act, to promote the safeguarding of human rights in Sweden, based on
the Swedish Instrument of Government, the Freedom of the Press Act, and the Fundamental Law on Freedom of Expression,
the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR),
the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, and
other obligations in the field of human rights binding on Sweden under public international law.
The Institute’s tasks and responsibilities are to:
monitor, investigate, and report on how human rights are respected and implemented in Sweden,
present proposals to the Government on the measures needed to ensure human rights;
liaise with international organisations and otherwise engage in international cooperation; and
promote education, research, development of expertise, dissemination of information and consciousness raising in the field of human rights.
One of the responsibilities of the Institute is, as required of the States acceding to the Convention, to fulfil the role of an independent national mechanism as set out in Article 33 (2) of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to promote, protect and monitor the implementation of the Convention.
The Institute may propose to the Government of Sweden that Sweden’s obligations under international law within the field of human rights be expanded.
The Institute will not review complaints from individuals concerning violations of human rights.
By studying different stages of ageing and focusing on people in midlife, researchers at Lund University are developing proactive approaches for health care, social services and community planning. This will contribute to improved health and quality of life for future generations of older people.
Dementia and arthritis are examples of diseases that become more common as we get older, and to some extent depend on our lifestyle in younger years. Loneliness and problematic alcohol consumption are some of the factors that affect the risk of illness in old age. Moreover, attitudes to ageing, our standard of living and the environment have effects on activity and participation in later life.
Research targeting younger people
Preventive measures to promote healthy ageing from midlife – or even earlier – are therefore needed. Here, transdisciplinary research targeting younger people, such as today’s 50- and 60-year-olds, has a crucial role to play.
Researchers in this profile area:
study diseases associated with brain ageing
examine the relationship between the environment and older people’s activity, participation, mobility and health
consider the needs, wishes and abilities of older people in the development of new technologies for future generations
develop interdisciplinary and cross-boundary strategies and methodologies for proactive ageing research
place particular focus on cognitive and musculoskeletal health as prerequisites for activity and participation
include ethical, social, cultural, and societal perspectives
develop methods for identifying people at risk of disease or who are vulnerable in other ways, using economic, social, and biological markers.
This profile area brings together world-leading researchers in medicine, health sciences, social and behavioural sciences, economics, law, science and technology.
On the 20th of September we welcomed Jinyan Zeng to Human Rights Lunch online! Jinyan Zeng let us in on the concepts of Autoethnography and First-person filmmaking, followed by short film clips of documentary films made by women including Jinyan Zeng herself. The focus during the seminar was on women living under political violence, market exploitation, and gender pressure. Through reflecting on themes and processes of documentary filmmaking and distribution, Jinyan Zeng highlighted the unique way of women’s expression in social contestation, artistic representation, and intellectual debate.
One of the films Jinyan has contributed to and will be discussing during the seminar is A Poem to Liu Xia, a short film made on International Women’s Day 2015 in collaboration with Zeng Jinyan (writer, Hong Kong) and Liao Yiwu (Composer/Performer, Berlin). This short film is a tribute for the Chinese Artist Liu Xia, then wife, now widow, to the 2010 Nobel Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The film was done when Liu Xia was under house arrest in Beijing without charge to remind us all that Liu Xia’s art may be forbidden in China but she is not forgotten.
Dr. Jinyan Zeng 曾金燕 works at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. She is a scholar and documentary filmmaker. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and activism, and ethnicity, with a particular emphasis on the Chinese speaking world. Among various publications, she has authored Feminism and Genesis of Citizen Intelligentsia in China (in Chinese, 2016, City University of Hong Kong Press), co-edited Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen, Forthcoming 2024, Bloomsbury), and co-directed documentary film Outcry and Whisper (2020, with Wen Hai and Trish McAdam).
On February 21-22 of this year, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights conducted its seventh periodic review of Sweden.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted in 1966 and ratified by Sweden in 1971, incorporates only a portion of the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. Nevertheless, the covenant is renowned for its scope and complexity. The rights we now classify as economic, social, and cultural encompass the right to self-determination, rights associated with employment and safe working conditions, trade union rights, the right to social protection, family support, the right to an adequate standard of living (including food, clothing and housing), the right to health, the right to education, as well as cultural rights (including academic freedom and the right to engage in one’s country’s cultural life).
The recommendations for Sweden issued by the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in early March cover most of these areas. They include topics like climate policy, development assistance, the rights for gig workers, access to basic public services for asylum seekers and irregular migrants, decriminalization of drug use, discrimination and harassment in schools, the repatriation of Sami human remains and cultural artifacts, and much more.
The Committee particularly emphasizes three areas where it expects Sweden to submit additional information within two years. First, it calls for the complete implementation of the new consultation law for the Sami people in Sweden, ensuring compliance with international standards for free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). Second, it expects measures to address labor exploitation, including effective protection against violence and harassment for migrant workers and their families. Finally, it requests Sweden to ensure that social insurance programs, such as unemployment benefits and daily allowances for asylum seekers, are sufficient to safeguard the right to an adequate standard of living.
In my job at the Swedish Institute for Human Rights, I had the privilege of participating in drafting our alternative report to the Committee and attending the review in Geneva. Our report highlights, among other things, a survey we published in 2023, which showed that economic, social, and cultural rights are relatively unknown in Sweden. Few people know what these rights entail in practice and how they can be enforced. Just like the joint submission by civil society organizations, we also criticize Sweden’s reluctance to ratify the third optional protocol that provides an individual complaint mechanism to the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, a reluctance we believe stems from an outdated view of economic, social, and cultural rights as policy declarations and objectives rather than actual rights.
Working on the report served as a stark reminder of how rights, which have been central to the international human rights collaboration since the 1940s, remain relatively unknown and unfulfilled in a country that often prides itself on being a pioneer in realizing rights. It was a first-hand encounter with what some scholars refer to as “the Nordic human rights paradox.” Yet it was also an experience that prompted me to reflect critically on my own education and teaching, and to what extent I had given these rights the attention they deserve.
I took my first course in interdisciplinary human rights studies at Lund University in the fall of 2006. After completing my Master’s and PhD degrees in Lund and a postdoctoral fellowship based in Uppsala, I had the privilege of teaching at the bachelor’s and master’s programs in human rights and democracy at University College Stockholm, the institution that in the mid-1990s was the first to establish specialized human rights education at the university level in Sweden.
I have always cherished being in these interdisciplinary environments where legal, philosophical, political science, sociological, theological, and historical perspectives are combined and contrasted, with the aim of understanding the conditions necessary for human rights to be meaningful and actualized, as well as to comprehend the dynamics in situations where they are undermined, or as is more often the case, realized—but not fully and not for everyone.
During my undergraduate studies, we did engage with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), grappling with the difficulties of interpreting maximalist concepts like the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and the challenges of applying the idea of the progressive realization of rights. However, more complex and somewhat more mundane issues such as access to education, adequate health care, trade union rights, and the right to safe and adequate working conditions were generally pushed to the side in favor of more eye-catching cases of gross violations, including historic and contemporary examples of racial segregation, torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide. My education was essentially about violence.
Later, when teaching students at various levels about human rights, a select set of issues concerning economic, social, and cultural rights became important to me. I did my best to introduce students to the debate on the relationship between human rights and social and economic inequality that flourished in the late 2010s, much due to great books by Samuel Moyn and Jessica Whyte. While they didn’t agree among themselves, they all stressed the limits of rights-based politics during times of accelerated global warming, increasing inequalities, and the dismantling of universal welfare systems. Or as I put the question to my students: Why care about reforms to protect individual rights in a burning and unequal world?
The problem is that discussions about the general relationship between human rights and economic inequality tend to be abstract and disconnected from the concrete challenges related to specific rights, such as the right to health, education and housing. They are intriguing for scholars who like big ideas but offer little guidance to practitioners. It’s telling that the debates on human rights and inequality rarely take into account the resources available within international human rights law to address social stratification and discrimination within sectors like education, employment, and healthcare. The resources within the actual human rights systems are overlooked in order to point to the shortcomings of human rights discourse.
Following the CESCR Committee’s review also gave me an opportunity to critically reflect on some of the arguments developed within political philosophy to explain the basis for the existence of rights. A textbook I read as an undergraduate and later tortured my students with is James Nickel’s classic “Making Sense of Human Rights”. Nickel defends a limited understanding of economic, social, and cultural rights. The argument is that these rights are essential for people to enjoy basic needs for a minimally decent life but also to enjoy other—purportedly more central—rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
This type of “linkage arguments” are somewhat in line with the thesis of the indivisibility and interdependence of rights. But it has struck me how attempts to give human rights moral and political grounding within political philosophy are often based on an implicit understanding of civil and political rights as more fundamental than other rights. Linkage arguments often depart from an idea that civil and political rights are inherently good, whereas social, economic and cultural rights can be justified because of the work they do, because they support the good.
This implicit division between different categories of rights is why the work initiated by scholars like Steven L. B. Jensen and Charles Walton to dissect the histories of economic, social, and cultural rights is so necessary. By pointing to the deep history of some of the rights contained in the ICESCR, and by exposing how the division between civil and political rights and social, economic, and cultural rights itself is a product of a very specific historical moment, they challenge us to reassess perceptions that are more or less established among both human rights scholars and practitioners.
For those of us teaching human rights from a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, it becomes an important challenge not to take division between broad categories of rights too seriously, especially when the division is associated with a corresponding notion of which rights are ‘real’ rights and which are a rendered as mere supporting structures or abstract goals.
Linde Lindkvist
Linde Lindkvist is a Senior Advisor at the Swedish Institute for Human Rights as well as Visiting Research Fellow and Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Human Rights Studies at Lund University. Lindkvist specializes in questions of human rights history, the right to religious freedom and children’s rights. His recent research and publications concern the political origins of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).
The profile area is launching Lund Human Rights Reports and Working Papers, a series of interdisciplinary human rights working papers and reports addressing current issues and phenomenon related to human rights produced by the Lund University Human Rights Profile Area. The first issue of Lund Human Rights Reports and Working Papers is “Human rights education at Lund University. What are the challenges and opportunities for collaboration?” written by Frida Nilsson. You can find the first issue below.
We will launch Lund Human Rights Reports and Working Papers on the 19th of April at 12:15-13 during Human Rights Lunch Online. During the lunch webinar Frida Nilsson will shortly comment the report, and after that Matthew Scott and Vasna Ramasar are invited to discuss the report. Matthew Scott is a senior researcher and leader of the Human Rights and the Environment thematic area at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law as well as a n adjunct senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Lund University. Vasna Ramasar is a senior lecturer at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University. Both of them have also been interviewed for the report.
Christina Johnsson, Frida Nilsson and Orla Ní Cheallacháin
Frida Nilsson reflects on the conference Human Rights in Higher Education, organized by the Lund University Profile Area Human Rights, 19-20 October 2023. Frida is a PhD in Human Rights Studies and specializes in human rights education. She has just completed a review of human rights teaching in Master courses and programs at Lund University.
Although human rights education at universities is no longer new to the academic family in Sweden – the Lund University interdisciplinary Bachelor program in Human Rights Studies celebrates 20 years this year! – we are yet to explore human rights education in higher education. The LU Profile Area Human Rights organised a conference on this theme on 19-20 of October 2023. For the first time teachers and researchers in human rights from Swedish universities as well as prominent international human rights education scholars came together with representatives from the Swedish Institute for Human Rights and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute to discuss this question: what is it that we teach when we teach human rights? The occasion served, for me, as an invaluable exchange of knowledge and experience in teaching human rights and researching human rights education.
Among the themes discussed were human rights as a possible profession, what “interdisciplinarity” means in research and teaching, what interdisciplinarity in research and teaching can accomplish and what it cannot, and how resilient human rights education in higher education can be given the political polarisation and intrusions on academic freedom today. This blogpost will not do justice to the many rich discussions and themes, but I will reflect briefly on what has stayed with me, as teacher and researcher in human rights education, and what I found particularly thought provoking. This academic year, I am immersed in questions of teaching human rights, human rights pedagogy, content, and purpose, and I found myself looking for answers regarding usefulness and purpose of human rights education.
The first day of the conference reflected a Swedish perspective on the educational purpose and aims of a human rights education – what are we teaching for, and for what are the students learning? Christina Johnsson (Malmö University) opened the conference with her report on an emerging human rights profession. This presentation in combination with other panel talks and discussions gave food for thought as it showed that human rights competences are integral to many professionals in public sector, while employers seemed to look for generic competences which characterises a good bureaucrat and co-worker. This tapped into the theme of what kind of human rights education we are offering at Lund University. I presented the results of my review of programs and courses in the field of human rights at our university, acknowledging that “human rights education” is a wider phenomenon than program and courses that explicitly have “human rights” in the title. On this broad understanding, I have found that Lund university offers three types of human rights education:
Concept-oriented education. This refers to courses and programs where human rights are at the core: human rights are the object of study, the focal point that make specific topics and issues relevant for the education.
Implementation-oriented education. This refers mainly to professional degree programs that involve application of human rights standards, for example the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Human rights are viewed here primarily as a matter of legal knowledge and institutional ethical practice, and human rights are taught as a complement to the main subject. To this category belong programmes where practical implementation of relevant human rights standards is part of the students’ future careers.
Purpose-oriented education. This refers mainly to programs where human rights as a multidisciplinary field at some points or on specific issues are perceived to provide a relevant perspective on the topic at hand. These programs usually have a focus on social justice and use human rights to deepen or broaden the understanding of their subject.
This typology reflects an inclusive way of understanding human rights education, as well as a multidisciplinary way of thinking about what human rights are.
On the second day of the conference, we discussed international perspectives. I found that my typology could be put in contrast to a model presented by Orla Ní Cheallacháin (Global Campus of Human Rights, Venice). According to the model, developed by Utrecht University, multidisciplinary research and education usually start with a disciplinary grounding and basic knowledge related to specific disciplines, and then move on to perspective-taking, that is, using the different disciplinary groundings to analyse whatever matter is at hand. In human rights degree programmes, the disciplinary groundings might differ slightly but usually include law, ethics, philosophy, and history. On to this model, education programs then proceed to finding common ground while making the differences and similarities in conceptions and language explicit, and then finally integrate these different perspectives.
My generation of human rights scholars, who are educated within human rights degree programmes that are already multidisciplinary, skipped the first step – the disciplinary grounding. This also goes for the students I now teach, as they are expected to start with the concept of human rights as the basis for other perspectives. This begs the question if we, by doing multidisciplinary human rights education, are doing our students a disservice by not making explicit what the disciplines are. It also makes me reflect on when a multidisciplinary field turns into a new discipline, what it takes to get there, and if it’s a good thing or not. Even though multidisciplinary human rights education is established in the world of higher education, it was clear from the conference that the step towards it becoming a discipline in its own right is not yet taken.
This leads me back to the question of what we are educating for. The discussions at the conference kept coming back to how we equip our students through human rights education. One aspect of human rights teaching that many programs at LU have in common is educating human rights professionals that can handle the daily challenges of respecting, fulfilling and protecting human rights in their future public sector function or capacity, knowing the limits of institutional reach, and to implement political decisions. However, as was reflected throughout our discussions, the purpose and need for human rights scholars is not so much about providing the public sector with efficient bureaucrats who know how to implement policy, but rather to create critical civil servants with integrity to protect the fundamental values of democracy and human rights, ready to use their knowledge to raise the alarm when human rights standards are challenged or not met. A take-away for me is that we need students to reflect on the complexities and challenges that come with the changing democratic landscape. I believe human rights education is a way forward.
Digital technologies have transformed our everyday lives and our modern worldviews. While digital technologies have the potential to drive innovation in ways previously unimagined, they also pose significant challenges to democratic values and human rights. A new interdisciplinary research group sets out to develop a better understanding of how digital inequalities impact human rights in a world that is increasingly polarized.
The thorough integration of digital technologies in the way we live, work, and interact prompts questions of inequality and exclusion. Innovative digital technologies, such as AI and LLMs that power technological products like chatGPT and other chatbots, have serious societal implications, resulting in potentially far-reaching digital inequalities.
We already know that the use of algorithms in digital spaces – including facial recognition technology – can lead to injustice and discrimination, particularly affecting vulnerable groups in polarized and unequal societies. In a recent article in TIME Magazine, Max Tegmark critically reflects that AI has “side effects worthy of concern”, including bias and discrimination, privacy loss, mass surveillance, job displacement, growing inequality, as well as misinformation and power concentration that are threats to democracy.
Digital inclusion and empowerment research shows that marginalized groups are further driven away from inclusion by state schemas like Sweden’s Digital First Mission that was initiated in 2015, with the agenda to become world-leading in digital public services. But, the value of digital technologies is defined by its people and the society that creates them. As such, digital technologies have the potential to either reify and deepen existing inequalities or offer enhanced potential for people to exercise their rights. With the rapid development of AI comes new challenges also for policy makers to make ethical decisions. Digital inequalities adversely affecting marginalized communities are part of the dynamic of the persistent unequal distribution of resources. Sen’s notion of inequality shows that inequality has gone through radical transformation, apparent in digital inequalities today.
The motivation to address the pressing issue of rising digital inequalities as a threat to human rights, stems from the fact that digitalisation has a controversial and potentially harmful role, and so it is not only about securing access for underprivileged communities. We need to understand the complexities of digital technologies, and especially their challenge to privacy, dignity, and equality, as core dimensions of human rights.
There is no doubt that digitalisation in many ways facilitate the right to free expression and has given momentum to social movements. Campaigns like #metoo, Refugees Welcome, and Fridays for Future have educated, alerted, and mobilized the world to steer action in the right direction in a way and with a speed that was unthinkable in pre-digitalisation times. But, the prevalent view of digitalisation as a global phenomenon is one-sided and often a westernized thought that oversimplifies global and international relations. Digitalisation is a privileged phenomenon and this raises crucial questions of justice and human rights. The inclusion of internet access targets in the UN 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development implies the acknowledgement of the central role of digitalisation in all aspects of human development and the fact that its benefits are not accessible to all segments of society, equally.
Digital-by-default policies have exacerbated digital inequalities, not only for the elderly, people with disabilities, and the poor but even for the very young, who start their own journeys manoeuvering through a complex digital landscape, that often finds them ill-equipped to understand the consequences. One question is whether countries like Sweden, that rank highly on the sustainable development agenda, have a particular social responsibility to ensure purposeful, cautious, reasoned, and ethical advancement of digitalization.
Developing a better understanding of how digital inequalities impact human rights in a world that is increasingly polarized is absolutely vital, and that is what we now set out to do. In an Advanced Study Group, with support from the Pufendorf Institute, we will explore the role digital technologies play across different levels of socio-economic status, across the globe.
We gratefully acknowledge the crucial contributions of the late Desmond Johnson. Without his initiative and enthusiasm, this Advanced Study Group would not have happened.
We also acknowledge the contributions of Prof. Cathy Urquhart, visiting professor at Department of Informatics, Lund University and Dr. Becky Faith, from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.
Young happy woman with a rainbow flag, symbol of the LGBT community on a pride in a European city. Human Rights, Equality, LGBT
Welcome to the conference Human Rights in Higher Education, 19-20 October, at LUX, Lund University. The Human Rights Profile Area co-organizes the conference with the Department of Theology at Uppsala University, the Swedish Institute for Human Rights, and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute. Our aim is to explore human rights as an area of knowledge in higher education and to launch it as a cross-disciplinary research field, in Sweden and internationally.
The conference is open for all but pre-registration is required. Day 1 is in Swedish and Day 2 in English. Sign up by contacting ilona.karppinen@mrs.lu.se and indicate if you will participate day 1, day 2 or both days. Read more about the conference and check out the program here.
We are proud to announce that our researcher Daria Davitti, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant! Her project “Refugee Finance: Histories, Frameworks, Practices” will examine financial instruments used to fund humanitarian responses to refugee situations. Traditionally, humanitarian organizations have relied on development or humanitarian aid. But due to global aid cuts, new avenues are now being explored. The aim is to understand how new financial instruments work in practice, how they change our understanding of refugee protection, and how they affect international law and humanitarian organisations. Daria Davitti says that “The idea of refugee finance is that you can invest in financial instruments such as social impact bonds that support refugee projects and receive a return if the projects succeed. However, it is complex and there are risks that this affects the focus and objectives of humanitarian organizations. And that it might ultimately change the legal understanding of international protection. The project will explore this complexity.” Read full interview with Daria here.
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