1. The Chilean Catalyst: Cold War Allies and Human Rights in the Western Hemisphere

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-61
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Western Hemisphere

The Politics of Complicity

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Critical Elements ◽  
International Policies ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
International Power

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, which reveals the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy. U.S. Cold War policies were deeply implicated in the human rights violations perpetrated by many of Latin America's governments. This entanglement of U.S. policy and human rights abuses make the Western Hemisphere a critical site for the development and implementation of U.S. human rights diplomacy during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies. New human rights advocacy targeting Latin America in the 1970s not only sought to mitigate foreign abuses but also challenge Cold War relationships between the United States and repressive right-wing regimes, contesting presidential prerogatives over the very mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy making. Latin America is essential for revealing the uniquely anti-interventionist and self-critical elements of human rights policy that took shape at this time; it was at the core — not the periphery — of both U.S. domestic policy debates and the new international policies that reached far beyond the hemisphere.

Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Denise Getchell
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Good Neighbor ◽  
The Cold War

This article reevaluates the U.S.-backed coup in 1954 that overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The coup is generally portrayed as the opening shot of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere and a watershed moment for U.S.–Latin American relations, when the United States supplanted its Good Neighbor Policy with a hardline anti-Communist approach. Despite the extensive literature on the coup, the Soviet Union's perspectives on the matter have received scant discussion. Using Soviet-bloc and United Nations (UN) archival sources, this article shows that Latin American Communists and Soviet sympathizers were hugely influential in shaping Moscow's perceptions of hemispheric relations. Although regional Communists petitioned the Soviet Union to provide support to Árbenz, officials in Moscow were unwilling to prop up what they considered a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution tottering under the weight of U.S. military pressure. Soviet leaders were, however, keen to use their position on the UN Security Council to challenge the authority of the Organization of American States and undermine U.S. conceptions of “hemispheric solidarity.” The coup, moreover, revealed the force of anti-U.S. nationalism in Latin America during a period in which Soviet foreign policy was in flux and the Cold War was becoming globalized.

The Clinton Administration and Africa: A View from Nairobi, Kenya

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-74
Author(s):  
Korwa G. Adar
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Clinton Administration ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Human Rights Movement

There is nothing more fundamental to Africans who are concerned with the future of the African continent than the issues of democracy, human rights, good governance, and the rule of law. These basic human liberties, among other concerns, constitute the central driving force behind what is often referred to as Africa’s “second liberation.” The primary purpose of this article is to assess the Clinton administration’s role in this second liberation, particularly in terms of its involvement in issues of democracy and human rights. This assessment is offered from the perspective of an individual who has been directly involved in the prodemocracy and human rights movement in Kenya. This article focuses on whether the Clinton administration’s policies are still heavily influenced by classic U.S. conceptions of realpolitik, or if enlightened leadership more in line with a neo-Wilsonian idealpolitik—as official rhetoric suggests—has permitted a fundamental departure in favor of a more coherent and tangible democracy and human rights foreign policy stance in the post-Cold War era.

scholarly journals The Right to Survival in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiyoung Song
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
North Korean Defectors ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Over Time

AbstractFor the past decade, the author has examined North Korean primary public documents and concludes that there have been changes of identities and ideas in the public discourse of human rights in the DPRK: from strong post-colonialism to Marxism-Leninism, from there to the creation of Juche as the state ideology and finally 'our style' socialism. This paper explains the background to Kim Jong Il's 'our style' human rights in North Korea: his broader framework, 'our style' socialism, with its two supporting ideational mechanisms, named 'virtuous politics' and 'military-first politics'. It analyses how some of these characteristics have disappeared while others have been reinforced over time. Marxism has significantly withered away since the end of the Cold War, and communism was finally deleted from the latest 2009 amended Socialist Constitution, whereas the concept of sovereignty has been strengthened and the language of duties has been actively employed by the authority almost as a relapse to the feudal Confucian tradition. The paper also includes some first-hand accounts from North Korean defectors interviewed in South Korea in October–December 2008. They show the perception of ordinary North Koreans on the ideas of human rights.

What Future for Human Rights?

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Nickel
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
The Cold War

Like people born shortly after World War II, the international human rights movement recently had its sixty-fifth birthday. This could mean that retirement is at hand and that death will come in a few decades. After all, the formulations of human rights that activists, lawyers, and politicians use today mostly derive from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the world in 1948 was very different from our world today: the cold war was about to break out, communism was a strong and optimistic political force in an expansionist phase, and Western Europe was still recovering from the war. The struggle against entrenched racism and sexism had only just begun, decolonization was in its early stages, and Asia was still poor (Japan was under military reconstruction, and Mao's heavy-handed revolution in China was still in the future). Labor unions were strong in the industrialized world, and the movement of women into work outside the home and farm was in its early stages. Farming was less technological and usually on a smaller scale, the environmental movement had not yet flowered, and human-caused climate change was present but unrecognized. Personal computers and social networking were decades away, and Earth's human population was well under three billion.

Human Rights, Perestroika and the End of the Cold War

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-141
Author(s):  
Marie-Pierre Rey
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Cold War
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