A World Divided: A Global History of Rights and Removals since the French Revolution

FAIN: FA-55940-11

Eric David Weitz
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

A World Divided is a combined history of the segmentation of populations and of human rights in the modern era. The book explores the transformation from the acceptance of diversity under the state as a fact of life to the drive for homogeneity, with both humanitarian and lethal consequences for populations great and minor. The book probes the dilemma that accompanied the creation of rights. Despite the universal claims of the French Revolution, an individual only has rights as a member of a nation, and nations have so often been defined in exclusive ethnic or racial terms. The question that runs as a red thread through A World Divided is: who constitutes the nation? The eleven chapters of the book detail, in specific cases around the globe, programs and policies like forced deportations, minority rights, self-determination, assimilation, territorial partitions, and genocides--the variety of strategies through which states sought to create homogeneity despite the reality of diversity.