Research at LSE Human Rights

Archive Stories

Archive Stories is a website that forms a central part of Dr Sara Salem and Dr Mai Taha’s ongoing project around community, radical, creative and anticolonial archival practices. We wanted to create a space for conversations about archiving beyond institutional archives, to think through the possibilities that open up when we imagine the archive as expansive and as encompassing everything around us. The website rejects the notion of a complete archive, instead seeing archiving as an incomplete and always-expanding practice.  

Revolutionary Papers  

Revolutionary Papers is an international, transdisciplinary research and teaching initiative on anticolonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South. It includes over forty university-based researchers, as well as editors, archivists, and movement organisers from around the world. The initiative looks at the way that periodicals played a key role in establishing new counter publics, social and cultural movements, institutions, political vocabularies and art practises. Dr Mahvish Ahmad; Dr Chana Morgenstern (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge) and Dr Koni Benson, Department of History, University of the Western Cape) are the lead researchers.   

Disembodied Territories 

Disembodied Territories maps the ways in which the African continent keeps reinventing, resummoning, or unbounding itself from dominant frames of place-making, as well as how diasporic and displaced Africans deploy critical ideas of space as a way of imagining an otherwise and an elsewhere. The map here is the question, not the answer, one we take the time to ask at the intersection of a world on fire. However, the answer to that question cannot be that we are/were colonised, it cannot be a reiteration of the violence and destruction of colonialism. There is always another story that we might want to tell. 

Embodying Memories, Rebuilding Histories 

Embodying memories, rebuilding histories (Cuerpo Historia, Cuerpo Memoria in Spanish) is a collective project in its initial stage. It aims to build a visual archive about Ecuadorian grassroots organisations’ initiatives to talk about sexual and reproductive health from 1965 to the present. Grassroots organisations have permanently spearheaded the transformation of sexual and reproductive health policies, but their labour and campaigning have seldom been preserved and studied. As part of the “Connecting3Worlds: Socialism, Medicine and Global Health After World War II” (University of Exeter) and in collaboration with members of the feminist community in Ecuador, we have started looking at communities’ contributions to long-lasting transformative health policy. Dr Andrea Espinoza Carvajal leads this project. 

Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity 

Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity (ICPS) is an interdisciplinary research group that aims to explore the politics of transnational solidarity by addressing the complications that arise in attempts to define, critique, and practice various strands of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The group is led by Dr Ayça Çubukçu in collaboration with LSE staff and doctoral students. The ICPS hosts an Annual Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity Lecture, which is free to attend and open to all. 

Find out more about ICPS, how to join, and its annual lecture series

Independent Panel of Inquiry into the Violence in Leicester, August-September 2022

In August-September 2022, violence erupted between groups of Hindus and Muslims from South Asia and rocked Leicester, a city that previously had a long, proud history of inter-communal conviviality and joint struggles against racism. The research aims to understand why the violence erupted by examining the broader trend of growing antagonism within some South Asian communities in Leicester and the UK. The project includes depth interviews, including with witnesses to the violence, focus groups, observation and social media research, surveys, and engagement with community, youth and women’s groups, law enforcement, and other statutory authorities. Funded by the Open Society Foundations, the project is jointly led by Dr Subir Sinha (SOAS) and Professor Chetan Bhatt (LSE) in collaboration with The Monitoring Group, London. 

The Revolutionary Road to Me:  Identity Politics and the Western Left 

The so-called ‘culture wars’ dominate many political agendas across the West.  This forthcoming book by Professor Chetan Bhatt, published by Polity Press in 2024, examines identity politics as one manifestation of broader identitarian thinking, the latter representing an expansive mode of being in the world that may be ubiquitous and normative, but needs to be questioned. After locating the emergence of identity politics through (often right-wing, often nineteenth century) ethnonationalism, the book considers the meanings of the self, the rise of a range of modern ‘personhoods’, and how these provide templates for contemporary identity politics of the political right and left.  The book investigates various institutional fields through which identity politics emerges, such as universities, NGOs, the ‘moral’ liberal corporation. The book focuses on the failures of the left to effectively address issues of class, poverty, inequality, and climate change, and instead focus on identity politics regarding sex, gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity. Identity politics on the left – and the university-based ideologies upon which it rests – is, the book argues, unmistakably a politics of elites and middle classes, whether white or diasporic, that serves to mystify their elite or class belonging, the latter far removed from the struggles of communities, the working classes, and the genuinely subaltern. The book examines in detail many of the problems of left-wing identitarianism during a period when authoritarian populist far-right forces are making rapid and powerful political gains. 

White Extinction: The Ideology and Politics of the Western Far-Right 

The fear of imagined white extinction is the driving force for racist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements that have emerged with considerable energy in the West.  The fear often takes the form of ‘replacement’ or ‘genocide’ of Euro-American white populations by others, and a violent white nationalism is often the far-right’s response. Potent ideas about white extinction appear across virtually all Western authoritarian populist movements and far-right movements, from violent neo-Nazi and identitarian movements and international anti-Muslim networks to the political mainstream across much of Europe and North America. Professor Chetan Bhatt’s new book, to be published by Polity Press in 2025, explores the origins of ideas about white extinction and their travel from 18th century fears of slave and indigenous rebellion to the present day in Europe and the United States. In the origins of Aryan thinking in early German Romanticism and its spread in Victorian Britain, the book examines ideas about nature’s life force and the threats to it from others, such as the Jewish, the colonized, the non-white. Antisemitism, eugenics, anti-immigration movements, or concerns about China and its population in the early 20th century contained at their core the terror of the destruction of the ‘white race’. These ideas resonate powerfully today in populist anti-minority movements and in violent far-right ‘militant accelerationism’. The book seeks to demonstrate that white extinction is a primary theme in much political mobilization today around declining birthrates, population replacement, migration, and ‘national cohesion’. 

Human Rights. Human Remains 

Human Rights, Human Remains is a research project led by Dr Claire Moon. 

The project has resulted in a number of publications to date with more planned for the future, including two books and one special issue of the journal Mortality. The first book, Extraordinary Deathwork, concerns the particular and ‘extraordinary’ forms of death labour that emerged in response to mass violent death during Mexico’s so-called ‘war on drugs’. The second, entitled Human Rights, Human Remains, concentrates on the broader history, politics, practices, and ethics of forensic exhumations of mass graves. It looks at the dead body as the object of humanitarian concern and action. It asks whether, as a result of historical and contemporary humanitarian activity around the dead, we can now argue that the dead have human rights.

In support of this research, Claire undertook professional training in forensic anthropology (grave exhumation and human skeletal identification) and death management, focussing on human rights investigations, mass disasters, and the humanitarian management of the dead.

You can watch a short film here about the research, entitled ‘Do the dead have human rights?’

Human Rights, Human Remains has been generously funded at various stages of its evolution by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust and LSE. The research has informed the development of new international protocols and national and UN reports on mass grave location, protection and exhumation. In the process of conducting the research, Claire served on the advisory board of a citizen science collective of families of the disappeared in Mexico and continues to collaborate with family organisations searching for their missing relatives.