Conceptions of human rights of the anticolonial ‘black’ movements in Paris in the interwar period

• Doctoral thesis completed by Sebastian Frik, predoc univ. asst. from Nov. 2020 till Oct. 2025

• A sharp paradox characterised the French colonial empire: While the Declaration of 1789 celebrated universal liberty, systemic inequality was rampant in legal practice in the colonies. Most historiographies barely mention actors from the Global South as purely passive recipients of Western ideals. 
  The doctoral thesis breaks with that narrative, demonstrating in a micro-historical study that “black” actors in interwar Paris used the vocabulary of human rights as a tool to substantiate their political demands for freedom with legal arguments. Their new, hybridised understanding of global human rights disrupted European conceptions of law. 
  Colonised peoples held that the subject of human rights should no longer be understood as “white European” man, deploying it instead in the fight against colonial oppression.