In their opposition to American imperialism, radicals pursued many actions. They synchronized protests, helped deserting GIs find safety, strengthened ties with Vietnamese revolutionaries, put the United States on trial for genocide, and even organized international brigades to fight in Vietnam. But at this stage, they prioritized the ideological struggle, which was precisely what Vietnamese officials themselves sought most from their comrades in this part of the world. Indeed, Vietnamese revolutionaries believed that the war would be fought not only in the jungles of Vietnam but on the terrain of ideas. Collaborating closely with Vietnamese communists, radicals in the North Atlantic radicalized the discourse around the war. In fact, by the end of 1967, the general antiwar struggle grew far more radical. Radicals defined the enemy as imperialism, coded their internationalism as anti-imperialism, and revived the Leninist problematic of self-determination. This approach to internationalism became so popular that even those who did not consider themselves radicals adopted some of its core elements. By the late 1960s, anti-imperialism was beating out its many internationalist rivals – such as individualist human rights – to become the dominant way in which activists in the North Atlantic imagined international change.

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.

If the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia helped to shatter an already ailing anti-imperialist internationalism, a concomitant refugee crisis offered the rival vision of human rights internationalism a remarkable opportunity to fill the void. What remained of the anti-imperialist left contributed little to resolving the issue, yet the human rights internationalists stepped into the breach. Former French radicals turned humanitarians worked with Vietnamese refugees, Eastern European dissidents, and human rights groups such as Doctors Without Borders to organize a campaign against human rights violations in Vietnam. They chartered a hospital ship to rescue the refugees, which amounted to interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation-state, showcasing a new kind of humanitarian interventionism. At the same time, they internationalized the campaign, even winning the support of the US government, which was only too happy to use the crisis to rewrite the history of the war, rebrand itself as a virtuous nation, and shine a harsh spotlight on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite efforts to deflect charges of rights violations, the SRV could do little to explain itself in the face of undeniable evidence of repression. If anti-imperialism helped secure their international victory in the 1960s, human rights sealed their defeat a decade later. The remaining radicals in the North Atlantic fought back but had little to offer as an alternative. With the core notions of the Leninist problematic in question, the radical left’s vision of internationalism lost its appeal, particularly among a new generation of activists looking for a way to do good in the world. And with anti-imperialism’s influence over the wider progressive milieu slipping, human rights internationalism made a giant leap in consolidating its hegemony, so much so that even some committed anti-imperialists ended up accepting its terms as the least bad option.

The protection and promotion of human rights and democracy in Latin America, a region historically beset by civil strife, military actions, and foreign intervention, is a difficult task. Before World War II, human rights and democracy promotion were not factors in U.S.–Latin American relations (or, in fact, international relations in general). When the United States or regional governments invoked concerns about human rights or democracy during the Cold War, they did so based on narrow security interests rather than any serious commitment to human rights or democracy. However, there has been a renewed commitment to human rights and democracy in the twenty-first century. This chapter addresses human rights and democracy promotion in the context of the construction of norms and agreements by U.S. and Latin American governments.

This chapter argues that Amnesty International’s chief sovereign accomplishment in Lived Sovereignty is organizing a global human rights polity from disparate transnational publics. However, shadow relations between Amnesty and governments related to funding, country access, and negotiating reforms in its first two decades threatened to derail the moral purity that undergirds the protection of human rights in Idealized Sovereignty. Successfully navigating shadow hybridity has thus been a central yet understudied feature of Amnesty. The historical analysis contextualizes the difficult choices Amnesty made to become the world’s leading INGO. Amnesty thus helps us see that hybrid relations endure even when the stakes are very high, exemplifying the pervasiveness of hybrid sovereignty in global politics.

Incorporates first-person interviews with people who invented and implemented Amnesty International’s Urgent Action approach to demonstrate how early human rights advocacy implemented three tools of the justice of neighborhood - active care, habit, and appeals - and became a bridge to further political realization of justice. The chapter begins with a focus on a critical period in the early 1970s, when Amnesty International transitioned from working only for people imprisoned for nonviolent speech or beliefs, protected as “human rights” in articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to fighting to protect all people from torture and other forms of ill-treatment. Discusses the development of the Urgent Action approach in the USA and Germany. Discusses Amnesty International’s present-day Urgent Action approaches and questions related to effectiveness.

Explores the contents of the thousands of Urgent Action alerts issued by Amnesty International from 1975-2007 on behalf of individuals at risk from human rights violations. The chapter references to care, law, and justice as part of a distinctive culture of human rights argument. By analyzing references to law and aspects of justice in the thousands of UAs, the chapter charts change and continuity in human rights appeals over many years. Throughout the time period, the alerts give voice to the active care found in the justice of neighborhood by expressing, for example, fear for a person’s safety, and by inquiring about alleged ill-treatment of people by authorities or their agents. Appeals to global human rights norms in the documents indicate the emerging importance of law as a tool for the political realization of justice at the global level.

This chapter analyzes how political prisoners in 1980s Poland sought to put their plight on the agenda of East–West relations. In so doing, this chapter reconstructs a central symbol of 1980s global human rights culture: the prisoner of conscience. The prisoner of conscience, the chapter shows, was the result of how Amnesty International had reimagined the struggle against political incarceration. In the past, this struggle had been driven by solidarity with political prisoners' specific ideology; Amnesty's activism, in contrast, centered on empathy with the plight of suffering individuals who tried to defend their very humanity against an all-powerful state. By drawing on this discourse and the social practices associated with it, especially hunger strikes, the Polish prisoners managed to turn themselves into icons of human rights culture, quasi-sacred images of the international community's most hallowed values. Yet this process also divorced the prisoners from the specific political aims they were struggling for, allowing powerful international actors to project their own views onto them. For all its antipolitical imagery, the chapter shows, the “prisoner of conscience” was part of a symbolic politics of human rights.

This chapter discusses how the book's main themes relate to the historiography of human rights. It makes four points: First, it argues that the history of the Solidarity movement shows how precarious and contested human rights remained in international politics well into the 1980s, a finding that challenges the view of the 1970s as the final breakthrough of human rights. Second, this chapter argues that the history of Polish dissent and of its supporters in France and the USA reveals discourses in which human rights were not seen as an alternative to politics so much as a means of creating a new kind of politics. Even the overtly antipolitical imagery of groups like Amnesty International merely concealed a profound symbolic politics of human rights. Third, the findings of the book do not suggest that the origins of human rights really lie in the 1980s but that the entire quest for a point of origin is misguided. The history of human rights, rather, is one of their continuous competitions with other universalisms, their repeated reinvention, and adaptation to new causes. Fourth, this chapter argues that the book's findings show that human rights had a crucial impact on the end of the Cold War.

As the Reagan administration reinvigorated the Cold War during its first term, US officials also expanded ongoing dialogue with Hanoi. This incongruity is explained by the fact that the issues American officials championed all painted vivid pictures of the evils of communism, including PO/MIA accounting and emigration programs for South Vietnamese, including Amerasians and former reeducation camp detainees. US officials described these causes as “humanitarian” causes. While discussions on “political” issues remained suspended, humanitarian concerns dominated the US-SRV agenda. US officials consistently earmarked more than 50% of annual refugee admissions slots for Indochinese throughout the 1980s.

Reagan’s celebration of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause” and casting of the American soldier as a national hero reverberated widely. Veterans’ rising political capital opened even more space for members of Congress who had served in Vietnam to become some of the most prominent American voices in the US-SRV normalization process. At the same time, nonstate actors continued to play crucial roles. This chapter uses Ginetta Sagan’s Aurora Foundation to highlight the importance of NGO advocacy, the ongoing linkage between humanitarian and human rights rhetoric, and the ways gender dynamics played an important part in solidifying connections between nonexecutive actors.

Chapter 4 shows how Peter Benenson’s initial idea for a one-year campaign on behalf of ‘prisoners of conscience‘ in May 1961 swiftly turned into a permanent organisation with the title Amnesty International. The chapter begins with a detailed account of how Benenson, in association with Eric Baker, launched the ‘Appeal for Amnesty‘, and explores the reasons for its remarkable success. There is then a discussion of the consolidation, in the period 1961-1964, of key elements of Amnesty’s practice – such as the archive of political prisoners, and the formation of local campaigning in ‘Groups of Three‘. A separate section analyses the role of religion in the early phase of Amnesty. The concluding part of the chapter shows how Amnesty also, from the very beginning, developed as an international campaigning organisation, even though the initial national sections were often extremely fragile.

The chapter provides the historical and historiographical context for the themes studied in the book. It begins with a discussion of the emerging concept of a ‘human rights movement‘ in the postwar decades. This is followed by an analysis of the different types of activists involved: inspirational leaders, managerial leaders, wealthy supporters, employees and grass-roots activists. The social and religious environments that encouraged and nurtured activism are then analysed, including the role of the Quakers, the United Nations Association and the Jewish community. The four principal antecedents of human rights activism are identified as the tradition of ‘English‘ rights and freedoms, anti-slavery, humanitarianism and internationalism. The chapter concludes by elaborating the book’s chronological and conceptual parameters.

This concluding chapter emphasises the book’s principal findings, in particular with regard to the different forms of leadership within human rights activism, and the various social groups involved. The chapter then looks briefly at how human rights activism evolved under the very different conditions – both nationally and internationally – of the 1980s.

Chapter 8 looks at the putative ‘breakthrough‘ of human rights in the 1970s, both in terms of the proliferation of activist organisations and their greater impact on governments. Beginning with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International, the chapter then looks more widely at the events of the 1970s and Amnesty’s growth. Although the membership of the British Section did not expand as rapidly as that of some other national sections, Amnesty represented a model of activism that many other organisations sought to emulate. These included Index on Censorship and the Minority Rights Group. By the later 1970s attempts were being made to organise the ‘field of human rights‘ into loose organisational networks.

Chapter 5 looks at Amnesty’s development in the mid-1960s, and in particular the major crisis that engulfed the organisation in 1966-1967 over its involvement in the crises in Aden and Rhodesia. The chapter opens with an overview of the crisis, which resulted in the departure of Peter Benenson. Two key aspects are then explored in detail; first, Amnesty’s relations with the British state, in particular the secretive Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, and, secondly, Peter Benenson’s long-standing engagement with the problems of southern Africa. It is argued that the crisis was due, in part, to Benenson’s attempt to devise new mechanisms for non-governmental intervention. The chapter concludes with an account of the drive to reform and professionalise Amnesty under the leadership of Martin Ennals.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s activists became deeply concerned about the increasing use of torture by states, and this swiftly became a central issue for their activities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the campaigns against torture in Greece, Chile and Spain. This is followed by a major re-evaluation of Amnesty’s decision to launch an international campaign for the abolition of torture in 1973, emphasising the significance of the role played by the Quaker activist Eric Baker. The final section examines the Soviet Union’s decision to place political opponents in psychiatric hospitals, a practice that was seen by activists as an act of torture. The chapter argues that the campaign against torture marked a relaunching of Amnesty International, and, indeed, of human rights activism more generally.

The 1960s were a decade of disappointment and depression for human rights activists. Yet, while far from a dominant framework, diverse Australians found that their needs to reorient or intervene in domestic political realities aligned with particular readings of the UDHR’s universalism. Human rights served as a way of reconceptualising socialism in an advanced capitalist democracy like Australia, recasting the Communist Party of Australia as defenders and extenders of the rights it had long dismissed as bourgeois. The seemingly monolithic power of the Australia’s Returned Servicemen’s League was shaken by a group claiming to be human rights’ true advocates by supporting those whose consciences were being trampled by conscription. Amnesty International's uptake was quick in Australia, but the nascent group’s novel reading of human rights posed as many challenges as it did opportunities, leading to often-public internal disputes over the limits of human rights as domestic political tools. The questions these groups posed – did the enjoyment of rights result from a citizen’s compact with the state, granting rights and the compulsion to obey, or universal and inhering in the individual through a relationship with god or an inalienable secular conscience? – proved central in decades to come.