Search Results

This book explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the U.S. government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. The book shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, the book shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in diverse places. The book tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, it explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

In a turbulent era, with illiberal nationalism on the rise and international laws and institutions under persistent threat, this book asks what future the international human rights system has. It rejects the claims of those who view human rights law and advocacy as ineffective or worse in challenging injustice. Instead, it presents an experimentalist account of human rights which emphasizes the ongoing engagement between domestic activists and international and domestic institutions and actors in promoting rights-based change. Rather than the monolithic movement depicted in some academic critiques, it discerns a rich and diverse human rights movement which has helped significantly to challenge injustice and advance progressive change in many contexts. Drawing on case studies of gender justice, disability rights, children’s rights and reproductive justice from Pakistan, Argentina and Ireland, the book argues that the human rights movement has made an important difference around the world. It shows that despite daunting contemporary challenges including illiberalism, climate change, inequalities, pandemics and digitalization, human rights advocates and activists are engaged in critical self-reflection, renewal and reform that should enable the human rights movement to engage effectively with these challenges in the future. Indeed, the formidable challenges of our current turbulent era provide powerful reasons to reform, innovate, and strengthen the tools and practices of the human rights movement for the future, rather than abandon it, encourage others to do so, or herald its demise.

Fact-finding is at the heart of human rights advocacy, and is often at the center of international disputes about alleged government abuses. Recently, there has been a huge increase in the number and variety of fact-finding mechanisms established, including by governments, intergovernmental bodies, nongovernmental organizations, and private actors. Human rights fact-finding is often controversial. In addition to objections lodged by some of the governments concerned, more objective observers have offered increasingly in-depth critiques of the composition, methodologies, interpretive techniques, and rigor of some of the investigations. Yet very little comparative or critical research has been undertaken in response, and human rights fact-finding remains strikingly under-examined and under-theorized. This book eschews the narrow focus of much of the older writing on this issue, adopting instead an interdisciplinary approach that combines perspectives from many fields, including international law, political science, forensics, informatics, and critical theory. The chapters combine discussion of methodology, institutional arrangements, theory, and case studies, and adopt critical approaches that challenge the received wisdom in the field. This book attests to the fact that human rights fact-finding practice and scholarship are currently in a period of significant transformation on numerous fronts. A rich scholarship is emerging, and practitioners are pushing forward a broader range of investigative techniques.

There has been a turn in human rights scholarship from a top-down focus on laws, institutions, courts, and elite actors towards a more bottom-up focus on civil society activists, advocacy groups, affected communities, and social movements. The chapters in this book discuss some of the causes, modalities, choices, and consequences of legal mobilization for human rights, including which groups claim rights, what rights they mobilize to protect, the goals they pursue, the forums they use, the obstacles they encounter, and to what degree and in what ways they are successful. The chapters include case studies of LGBTQ+ activism in authoritarian political systems, women’s engagement with the UN Security Council, the differing strategies of major NGOs as regards human rights approaches to climate change, the work of Indigenous communities resisting extractivism, and the legal empowerment of communities in a range of locations and contexts. Key themes emerging from the chapters include: the importance of the idea of human rights to communities that are dominated or marginalized; the ways in which political and societal authoritarianism shape and limit (but do not necessarily exclude) opportunities for effective mobilization; the importance of the choice of forum for seeking to bring about change; the role intermediary actors such as leading NGOs can play in innovating and reorienting strategies to address pressing challenges; the possibilities for subaltern mobilization to reshape human rights law and transform international legal understandings and concepts; and the importance of supporting genuinely community-led legal mobilization.

This book presents a compelling story of state violence, human rights advocacy, and transitional justice in South Korea since 1947. The “Jeju 4.3 events” were a series of armed uprisings and counterinsurgency actions that occurred between 1947 and 1954 in the rugged landscape around Mt. Halla in Jeju Province, South Korea. The counterinsurgency strategy was extremely brutal. The conflict resulted in an estimated thirty thousand deaths. News of this enormous loss of life was carefully suppressed until the success of the 1987 June Democracy Movement. This book traces the grassroots advocacy campaign that ultimately resulted in the creation of a truth commission with a threefold mandate: to investigate what happened in Jeju, to identify the victims, and to restore the honor of those victims. Although an official report was issued in 2003, resulting in an official apology from President Roh Moo Hyun (the first presidential apology for the abuse of state power in South Korea's history) the commission's work continues to this day. It has long been believed that truth commissions are most likely to be established immediately after a democratic transition, as a result of a power game involving old and new elites. The book tells a different story: it emphasizes the importance of sixty years of local activist work and the long history of truth's suppression.