This volume contains a selection of the edited and in some cases translated papers presented at the first South-South Human Rights Forum held in Beijing. The conference was jointly sponsored by the State Council Information Office and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The event drew hundreds of participants, mainly scholars and government officials from developing countries and international organizations. Its main theme was “Building a Human Community with a Shared Future”, which built on a proposal launched by President Xi Jinping. The papers are mostly short and often policy-oriented, offering a unique insight into the thinking and planning associated with this South-South exchange and thus a wealth of information of interest to scholars. The topics covered emerge primarily from development-related issues, such as the rights to food, education, health and poverty reduction. Though much of the volume thus focuses on economic and social rights and the right to development, civil and political rights are also discussed in the context of the need for legal guarantees for the exercise of human rights and judicial protection of rights.

When haven’t we humans been on the move? The answer may be never. Unlike most of our closest primate relatives, to be human is to wander, to range far beyond that little patch of familiar forest, into the unknown. It’s been the norm for us for at least several hundred thousand years. And even back at the beginning of human experience it may have had to do with climate change.

The very day that I finished reading this urgent and magisterial book, a new analysis was published concerning the earliest evidence we have yet found of indiscriminate violence against humans of all ages. Researchers from France and the United Kingdom, writing in Nature’s Scientific Reports (27 May 2021), analyzed the remains of sixty- one of our ancestors who lived at least thirteen millennia ago. Their bones had been discovered in the 1960s at Jebel Sahaba, a cemetery of the late Pleistocene, in the Nile Valley. The new paper revealed a hundred wounds previously missed, both healed and unhealed, suggesting that the dead, male and female, children and adults, were not as was thought, the victims of a single battle, but the battered casualties of long periods of sustained conflict. Their skeletons were riddled with wounds caused by projectiles, blunt trauma, and stabbings with sharpened stone weapons. The researchers believe that this brutality was a result of the long- term stress on resources caused by the climate change at the end of the last glacial maximum.