The phrase “democracy and human rights” is ubiquitous today. In public debates as well as academic discussions, it is often simply assumed that these two concepts are inseparable. It even seems self-evident that democracy and human rights mutually presuppose and advance each other. However, wherever things are taken for granted, for ordinary and natural, historians must become suspicious and begin to “make things strange” (Carlo Ginzburg). Thus, while it seems strange at first glance to tell the story of something that is treated and experienced as self-evident, that is precisely the point: How can the entangled history of democracy and human rights be written? What contexts and processes are hidden in the only seemingly innocent “and” that connects democracy and human rights as much as it separates them?

More information: CfA OeZG issue 1/2025 (pdf)

Colleagues who are interested in the tense relationship between political participation and fundamental rights and who would like to shed light on this relationship from a praxeological perspective are invited to contribute articles to the 2025/1 issue of the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/oezg): short abstracts (approx. 5,000 characters including spaces) should be sent in until 31 December 2022 to claudia.kraft@univie.ac.at and tim.neu@univie.ac.at. If a proposal is accepted, authors will write a first draft of their paper by 30 April 2023. These drafts will be discussed at an authors’ workshop in Vienna (30 June – 1 July 2023). After submission of the final version of the texts at the end of 2023, they will undergo an external peer-review process.