For most of human history, large societies have drawn clear lines between people who belong to the in-group and those who do not. These lines determine who is recognized, protected, or granted status, and who is excluded. But starting in the Enlightenment period, European societies began relaxing the rules around who was granted fundamental rights and protections, a development many scholars see as essentially unique in human history — one that has grown steadily over the past several centuries and continues today.
A recent SFI working group, held December 15–17, explored whether this expansion of human rights truly occurred in the way it seems to have, whether it is unique, and what might have caused it. “This expansion seems to have happened once, and only once,” says SFI Professor David Wolpert, who organized the meeting with Sam Zhang (University of Vermont), a recent SFI Applied Complexity Fellow. “Our first task is to confirm whether that’s true.”
To approach the problem, the group adopted a shared, operational definition of this human-rights expansion: the loosening, over time, of the criteria that elites use to decide who counts as in-group and who counts as out-group. “We’re not trying to measure an ‘amount’ of human rights,” Wolpert says. “We’re defining expansion as a shrinking of the criteria elites use to decide who is in the in-group.” These changes can often be seen in laws and court decisions, such as shifting rules about who is allowed to vote. The group’s first goal was to see whether broader historical data can show how these criteria have evolved across all societies and eras.
This goal has only recently become feasible, due to the growing availability of large-scale historical datasets that systematically compile information on social and political organization of human societies across centuries. Sources like the Seshat Global History Databank, led by Peter Turchin, a faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, may make it possible to test long-held assumptions about when and how rights expanded in different societies.
The workshop focused on long-term trends over one or more centuries, not short-term fluctuations around those trends. Accordingly, the second goal of the working group was to use the data sets to infer what features of a society might support long-term expansions of rights, and what features might lead to long-term reversals. Wealth per capita, political stability, cultural norms, and other factors have all been proposed as possibilities, but none has been subject to rigorous analysis.
The third goal was to build on the first two goals and begin developing mathematical theories for what leads rights to expand or contract over long timescales, and to test those theories against specific historical periods. By bringing together researchers from history, sociology, political science, statistics, applied mathematics, and complex systems, the organizers hoped to create shared concepts and a foundation for future work.
Through this mix of empirical testing, conceptual framing, and interdisciplinary dialogue, the group aimed to clarify one intriguing and vexing question in the study of human rights: why these shifts happened in the places and at the times they did, and how they reflect deeper principles of social change. “We know that human rights is a multifaceted, complex phenomenon,” says Zhang. “The question is whether we can understand it more simply.”
This meeting was supported by the Emergent Political Economies Grant from the Omidyar Network to the Santa Fe Institute.