Dr. Ned Richardson-Little

complete CV (2022)

seit 2019
Nachwuchsgruppenleiter an der Universität Erfurt - VolkswagenStiftung Freigeist Projekt: „The Other Global Germany: Transnational Criminality and Deviant Globalization in the 20th Century“

2014–2018
Associate Research Fellow an der University of Exeter. „1989 after 1989: The Fall of State-Socialism in a Global Perspective“, Leverhulme Trust unterstütztes Projekt. Prof. James Mark, Principal Investigator

2015
Leibniz Summer Fellow am Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF), Potsdam.
Official Commendation, Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History für „Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990“, Weiner Library, London.

2014
Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize für „Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990“, German Historical Institute, Washington DC

2008–2013
Promotion an der University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unter der Betreuung von Prof. Konrad Jarausch: „Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990“.

2012
Forschungsstipendien der American Historical Association (Washington DC) und des DHI-Washington

2011
Forschungsstipendium des Deutscher Akademischer Ausstauschdienstes (DAAD)

2010–2011
Förderung des Promotionsvorhabens durch das Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies – Freie Universität Berlin.

2006–2008
M.A. Geschichtswissenschaften an der McGill Universität (Montréal, Kanada): „Imagining the Archipelago – Western Conceptions of the Gulag, 1923-2000“.

2001–2005
B.A. in Geschichtswissenschaften und Politik an der McGill Universität (Montréal, Kanada)

• Menschenrechte
• Völkerrecht
• Globalisierung
• Internationale Kriminalität

Guns, Drugs, and Globalization: The Rise of Illicit International Trade and the Boundaries of Germany in the World 1890-1940

This project explores the role of Germany in the rise of global arms and narcotics trafficking and the efforts to contain these illicit trades from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi Era. In the late 19^th century, the proliferation of new avenues of global trade created a wave of moral panics and fears from state officials that uncontrolled cross-border flows threated the social order within Europe and the colonial order in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The two leading commodities that generated the greatest concern from state officials and moral crusaders were arms and drugs. A secondary market in the colonial world had exploded as European armies modernized and sought to profit from their obsolete arsenals while the global traffic in addictive medications such as cocaine, heroin and other opiate products raised the specter of the subversion of the colonial order through violent uprisings and social collapse. Through the lens of the emergence of international crime, this project aims to rethink the place of Germany in a globalizing world order as it transitioned from an Empire to a democratic republic and finally to the tyranny of the Third Reich. The history of arms and drug trafficking provides a window into shifting cultural understandings of crime at home and how they were linked to international affairs, but also illuminates ambiguous boundaries of "Germany" as an entity in an interconnected world.

Subproject of the VolkswagenStiftung-project: The Other Global Germany: Transnational Criminality and Deviant Globalization in the 20th Century

The Rights of the Volk: Human Rights, the Basic Law and the Far-Right since Reunification

Although commonly understood as opponents of the rule of law, constitutionalism and constitutional rights, in recent years, the German populist and far-right has sought to claim the mantle of the popular struggle for democracy the Basic Law, both historically and in the present. In order to distinguish itself from traditional far right ethnonationalism and avoid being surveilled or possibly banned as a threat to the free democratic order, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has aimed to portray itself as the vehicle for the realization of the promise of the liberal transition of 1989 and the protector of the basic rights of the German Volk. Positioning itself not as repudiation of the post-socialist liberal democratic transition, but as its natural heir the AfD and others in the far-right have sought to position any effort by to hinder the party in the name of preserving constitutional democracy as an extremist threat by the far-left, which threatens the rights of Germans and endangers the democratic transition from state socialism. This surface level commitment to constitutionalism also acts to cover völkisch legal theories that claim the rights of the Basic Law should apply only to members of the German Volk and see human rights protections as foreign interventions in the constitutional order imposed by globalist elites from Berlin, Karlsruhe or Brussels.

Subproject of the VolkswagenStiftung-project: Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives

Monografie

The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany, Cambridge u.a. 2020.

(Co-)Herausgeberschaften

(Re-)Constituting the State and Law during the ‚Long Transformation of 1989‘ in East Central Europe. Special Issue Journal of Modern European History (forthcoming, 2020) zusammen mit Michal Kopeček.

zus. mit: Dietz, Hella/ Mark, James, Socialism and Human Rights in East-Central Europe since 1945, Special issue: East Central Europe 46 (2019).

zus. mit: Grosescu, Raluca, The Socialist World and Post-War International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, Special Issue: Journal of the History of International Law 21 (2019).

Artikel und Aufsätze

Rights and Communism, in: Samuel Moyn and Meredith Terretta (Hg.) The Cambridge History of Rights: Volume V: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Cambridge University Press, im Erscheinen 2023.

Nehmt Menschenrechtsilliberalismus ernst! Vom Ge- und Missbrauch der Geschichte und der Schwierigkeit, diese zu schreiben, in: Johannes Haaf, Luise Müller, Esther Neuhann & Markus Wolf (Hg.) Die Grundlagen der Menschenrechte: moralisch, politisch oder sozial? Nomos Verlag, erscheint 2023.

Conclusion -- 1989: World-Historical Fracture and a Return to More of the Same, in: Kirrily Freeman/John Munro (Hg.) Reading the New Global Order: Textual Transformations of 1989. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Arms Intervention: Weimar Germany, Imperial Influence and Weapons Trafficking in Warlord China, in: Journal of Modern European History 19:4 (2021), S. 510-528)

Transnational Drug Trafficking and the German Embrace of International Narcotics Law from the Kaiserreich to the Nazis, in: Dietmar Müller and Katja Naumann (Hg.) Transregional Connections in the History of East Central Europe. De Gruyter, 2021.

'Hashers Don't Read Das Kapital': East Germany, Socialist Prohibition, and Global Cannabis. In: James Mills and Lucas Richert (Hg.) Cannabis: Global Histories. MIT Press, 2021.

zus. mit Merrill, Samuel, Who is the Volk? PEGIDA and the Contested Memory of 1989 on Social Media, in: Samuel Merrill, Emily Keightley & Priska Daphi (Hg.) Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media. Mobilising Mediated Remembrance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

zus. mit: Kopeček, Michal, Introduction: (Re-)Constituting the State and Law during the ‘Long Transformation of 1989’ in East Central Europe, in: Journal of Modern European History 18 (2020), S. 275-280.

From Tehran to Helsinki: The International Year of Human Rights 1968 and State Socialist Eastern Europe, in: Diplomatica: A Journal of Diplomacy and Society 1 (2019), S. 180-201. Online
zus. mit Dietz, Hella/ Mark, James, New Perspectives on Socialism and Human Rights in East Central Europe since 1945, in: Socialism and Human Rights in East-Central Europe since 1945, Special issue: East Central Europe 46 (2019), S. 169-187.

The Failure of the Socialist Declaration of Human Rights: Ideology, Legitimacy, and Elite Defection at the End of State Socialism.” in: Socialism and Human Rights in East-Central Europe since 1945, Special issue: East Central Europe 46 (2019), S. 318-341. Online
Human Rights Movements and the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Explaining the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, in: Wildenthal, Lora/ Quataert, Jean (Hg.) The Routledge History of Human Rights, Routledge 2019.

Abolishing the Exploitation of Man by Man: Socialism and Human Rights since Marx, in: Weinke, Annette/ Gosewinkel, Dieter (Hg.) Menschenrechte und ihre Kritiker. Ideologien, Argumente, Wirkungen, Göttingen 2019, S. 141-156.

zus. mit: Grosescu, Raluca, Revisiting State Socialist Approaches to International Criminal and Humanitarian Law: An Introduction, in: The Socialist World and Post-War International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, Special Issue: Journal of the History of International Law 21 (2019), S.161-180.

The Drug War in a Land Without Drugs: East Germany and the Socialist Embrace of International Narcotics Law,  in: The Socialist World and Post-War International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, Special Issue: Journal of the History of International Law 21 (2019), S. 270-298.

Human Rights, Pluralism and the Democratization of East and West Germany, in: Wenzel, Harald/ Jarausch, Konrad/ Goihl, Karin (Hg.), Different Germans, Many Germanies: New Transatlantic Perspectives, New York u.a. 2017, S. 158-177.

Human Rights as Myth and History: Between the Revolutions of 1989 and the Arab Spring, in: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 23 (2015), S. 151-166.

Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990, in: German Historical Institute Bulletin 56 (2015), S. 69-82. Online
Dictatorship and Dissent: Human Rights in East Germany in the 1970s, in: Eckel, Jan/ Moyn, Samuel (Hg.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, Philadelphia 2014, S. 49-67.

„Erkämpft das Menschenrecht“ – Sozialismus und Menschenrechte in der DDR, in: Eckel, Jan/ Moyn, Samuel (Hg.), Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren, Göttingen u.a. 2012, S. 120-143.

Rezensionen und Tagungsberichte

Molly Pucci, Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe. (Yale University Press, 2020) in German History, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2022), 140-141.

Craven Matthew, Sundhya Pahuja & Gerry Simpson (eds.): International Law and the Cold War. (Cambridge 2019) in the Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht/ Heidelberg Journal of International Law, Vol. 81, No. 1, (2021), 265-270.

"The History of the End of History", in "Debate on Philipp Ther's Europe since 1989," East Central Europe. (47: 2-3 2020).

Rezension zu: Mark Hurst, British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965–1985, London 2016, in: Journal of Contemporary History 54 (2019), S. 243–245.

Rezension zu: Sandrine Kott, Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society, Michigan 2014, in: H-German (2017). Online
Rezension zu: Kate E. Tunstall (Hg.), Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment, New York u.a. 2012, in: Traces: The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History (2013), S. 291-294.

Tagungsbericht: Human Rights / Social Rights. The Twentieth Century Predicament, 02.12.2010-04.12.2010, Potsdam, in: H-Soz-u-Kult (2011). Online
Rezension zu: John Rodden, Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent: Stories from East German Victims of
Human Rights Abuse, University Park: Pennsylvania State 2010, in H-Human Rights (2011). Online