International Aid and Development NGOs in Britain and Human Rights since 1945

UK international aid and development organisations such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid have become some of the most prominent NGOs in the world. Born out of the humanitarian response to crisis, they have subsequently become significant players in the global debate about long-term development. From advocating an alternative path to development in the 1960s and 1970s they have come to articulate a rights-based approach in the 1990s. For NGOs, this was a logical consequence of “scaling up” their activities. However, as Hilton demonstrates, it was the result of more complex processes which have gradually brought these ever larger organisations into the development mainstream.

Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization

Concluding this collection, Cooper places the question of social and human rights in the context of the acute uncertainty about world politics in the years after World War II. Not least of the questions was the unit in which rights could be claimed: nation-state, empire, humanity as a whole. That issue was particularly open in the years after 1945 because of struggles over colonialism. Could the expanding notion of social rights in postwar England and France be confined to the metropole, especially as colonial powers needed to redefine their basis of legitimacy and as social and political movements in Africa were asserting political voice? Political movements in the colonies were not necessarily focused on independence, but on the right to claim rights—social as well as political—in an imperial polity. The locus of rights, as well as their contents, have remained in question ever since.