Understanding the historical forces driving expansions of human rights

One of the striking aspects of cooperation in all social organisms is that it is accompanied by a stark divide between those who are in-group, and therefore to be cooperated with, versus those who are out-group, and therefore to be excluded. Almost all large human societies throughout the Holocene have relied on various criteria rather than personal acquaintance to determine who is in their in-group rather than personal acquaintance. This raises the deep question of just how expansive and inclusive the criteria are that any given human society will use to determine who is in their in-group. Of particular importance is the case where the human society in question is the elite of some larger social group, and "cooperating" with members of that in-group means according them "human rights.” We are particularly interested in whether and why the in-group criteria of the Elites seems to have relaxed so much more over the last several centuries in Europe, compared with all other societies in history.

Our working group will bring together researchers with a wide range of interdisciplinary expertise in order to (a) use empirical data to quantify the extent to which global human rights actually did grow so much larger over the last centuries in the West, (b) determine the properties of a human society that stimulate such an expansion of rights, and (c) to develop general theories for the expansion of human rights while testing them against data from specific historical epochs.