This cross-disciplinary collaboration offers historical and contemporary scholarship exploring the interface of Christianity and international law. Christianity and International Law aims to understand and move past arguments, narratives and tropes that commonly frame law-religion studies in global governance. Readers are introduced to a range of confessional and critical perspectives explicitly engaging a diverse range of methodological and theoretical orientations to rethink how we experience and find ourselves caught within the phenomena of Christianity and international law.

This cross-disciplinary collaboration offers historical and contemporary scholarship exploring the interface of Christianity and international law. Christianity and International Law aims to understand and move past arguments, narratives and tropes that commonly frame law-religion studies in global governance. Readers are introduced to a range of confessional and critical perspectives explicitly engaging a diverse range of methodological and theoretical orientations to rethink how we experience and find ourselves caught within the phenomena of Christianity and international law.

Did the history of human rights begin decades, centuries or even millennia ago? What constitutes this history? And what can we really learn from 'the textbook narrative' - the unilinear, forward-looking tale of progress and inevitable triumph authored primarily by Western philosophers, politicians and activists? Does such a distinguishable entity as 'the history of human rights' even exist, or are efforts to read evidence in past events of the later 'evolution' of human rights mere ideology? This book explores these questions through a collective effort by scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology. Rather than entities with an absolute, predefined 'essence', this book conceptualizes human rights as open-ended and ambiguous. It taps into recent 'revisionist' debates and asks: what do we really know of the history of human rights?

Did the history of human rights begin decades, centuries or even millennia ago? What constitutes this history? And what can we really learn from 'the textbook narrative' - the unilinear, forward-looking tale of progress and inevitable triumph authored primarily by Western philosophers, politicians and activists? Does such a distinguishable entity as 'the history of human rights' even exist, or are efforts to read evidence in past events of the later 'evolution' of human rights mere ideology? This book explores these questions through a collective effort by scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology. Rather than entities with an absolute, predefined 'essence', this book conceptualizes human rights as open-ended and ambiguous. It taps into recent 'revisionist' debates and asks: what do we really know of the history of human rights?