Rights and Civilizations

Rights and Civilizations, translated from the Italian original, traces a history of international law to illustrate the origins of the Western colonial project and its attempts to civilize the non-European world. The book, ranging from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, explains how the West sought to justify its own colonial conquests through an ideology that revolved around the idea of its own assumed superiority, variously attributed to Christian peoples (in the early modern age), Western 'civil' peoples (in the nineteenth century), and 'developed' peoples (at the beginning of the twentieth century), and now to democratic Western peoples. In outlining this history and discourse, the book shows that, while the Western conception may style itself as universal, it is in fact relative. This comes out by bringing the Western civilization into comparison with others, mainly the Islamic one, suggesting the need for an 'intercivilizational' approach to international law.

'This book certainly is a necessary addition to any collection devoted to international law.' S. R. Silverburg, Choice, 'Gustavo Gozzi has an ambitious and impressively far-reaching approach here [in this] study presented on the history and philosophy of international law … [T]he focus is on an investigation into the history of ideas, which is carried out by a critical interpretation of current problems in international relations ... This creates a fruitful tension.' Peter Schröder, Neue Politische Literatur

Gustavo Gozzi is full professor of the History of Political Doctrines and the History of International Law. He is currently Alma Mater Professor in Multiculturalism and Cultural Relativism at the University of Bologna. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the King Abdulaziz Chair for Islamic Studies at the University of Bologna. He has conducted research at the Max Planck Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main and has been visiting professor in Tunis, Istanbul, Tarragona, and Corinth. He is director of the series Democracies, Rights, Constitutions, and has founded a master's programme in International Cooperation on Human Rights and Intercultural Heritage.