scholarly journals Teaching the History of Human Rights and "Humanitarian" Interventions

2015 ◽  
Vol 103 ◽  
pp. 47-55
Author(s):  
Mary Nolan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Universal Declaration ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This article explores how I teach about human rights and so-called humanitarian interventions to MA and Ph.D. students.  The course has three main themes or foci.  First, what are human rights and why have the social and economic human rights laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights been so neglected or rejected, especially by the U.S.  Second, how has American foreign policy used and abused human rights.  Third, why have liberal or humanitarian interventions of a militarized sort become so prevalent since the end of the Cold War and why are they so damaging.  The goal is to get students to look critically at the meaning and uses of human rights, about which many display a naive enthusiasm.

scholarly journals Ideological Clichés and Myths as an Instrument of the U.S. Foreign Policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
V I Yakunin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The article deals with the analysis of the myths and ideological clichés as the fundamental elements of U.S. foreign policy. The author emphasizes the necessity to study the discourses formed by political elites around the main problems and directions of the state’s foreign policy. At the same time, in the article an attempt is made to integrate the achievements of Western and Russian political science related to ideological clichés and myths. Particular attention is paid to the role of myths and ideological clichés in the legitimization of the government’s foreign policy actions in the eyes of the electorate. The author shows the history of the formation of the basic myths and clichés of the U.S. foreign policy, their implementation during and after the Cold War. The article contains a detailed analysis of the concept of American exclusivity as well as the foreign policy guidelines that follow from it. In conclusion, the author shows how the world has adopted to such an approach for conducting foreign policy by the hegemonic state and what methods it uses to counteract it.

Chinese Human Rights and American Foreign Policy: A Realist Approach

2001 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Dittmer
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Trade Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Clinton Administration ◽  
International Organization ◽  
Realist Approach ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

This article focuses on the function of human rights as a foreign policy ideal in American foreign policy, particularly since the end of the Cold War. China became a challenging target of U.S. human rights policy after Tiananmen. Human rights as an ideal may be defended either by idealist or by realist means. Whereas the former are logically consistent with the ends, only the latter promises immediate results. The Clinton administration thus began with an attempt to manipulate trade policy to pressure China into improving its human rights policies. The administration then shifted to idealist means more consistent with idealist ends, including the resort to international organization sanctions. But here Washington failed even more conspicuously. The article concludes that human rights did not turn out to be a politically suitable ideal to orient U.S. foreign policy. The impact on China was fierce resentment. But human rights have improved.

Immunizing against the American Other: Racism, Nationalism, and Gender in U.S.-Icelandic Military Relations during the Cold War

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valur Ingimundarson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Military Presence ◽  
National Body ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The 1951 U.S. -Icelandic Defense Agreement paved the way for a permanent U.S. military presence at the Keflavik base in Iceland, an outpost that played a crucial role in U.S. strategy during the Cold War. The article explores two gender-related aspects of the U.S. -Icelandic Cold War relationship:the restrictions on off-base movements of U.S. soldiers, and the secret ban imposed by the Icelandic government on the stationing of black U.S. troops in Iceland. These practices were meant to “protect” Icelandic women and to preserve a homogeneous “national body.” Although U.S. officials repeatedly tried to have the restrictions lifted, the Icelandic government refused to modify them until the racial ban was publicly disclosed in late 1959. Even after the practice came to light, it took another several years before the ban was gradually eliminated. Misguided though the Icelandic restrictions may have been, they did, paradoxically, help to defuse domestic opposition to Iceland's pro-American foreign policy course and thus preserved the country's role in the Western alliance.

scholarly journals Superpower Dominance: The Yum Kippur Case

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 667-675
Author(s):  
Mohamad Hasan Soueidan
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Middle East ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

The Yum Kippur War, or as the Egyptians call it The October War, is one of the most important wars in the history of the Middle East between the coalition of Egypt and Syria versus Israel. It occurred at a time when the two superpowers then, the Americans and the Soviet Union, were in engaging in what was called the Cold War. For that every Superpower used to support a certain party of conflict to assure the balance of global dominance isn't affected. This paper reviews American foreign policy during the war in 1973. It concentrates on how the American institutions and foreign policy activists acted and influenced the outcome of the war. The paper finally conducts a counter analysis on what could have happened if the Americans didn’t support the Israelis in the war.

On American Values, Unalienable Rights, and Human Rights: Some Reflections on the Pompeo Commission

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Risse
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
American Values ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The U.S

AbstractIn July 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charged with a reexamination of the scope and nature of human rights–based claims. From his statements, it seems that Pompeo hopes the commission will substantiate—by appeal to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and to natural law theory—three key conservative ideas: (1) that there is too much human rights proliferation, and once we get things right, social and economic rights as well as gender emancipation and reproductive rights will no longer register as human rights; (2) that religious liberties should be strengthened under the human rights umbrella; and (3) that the unalienable rights that should guide American foreign policy neither need nor benefit from any international oversight. I aim to show that despite Pompeo's framing, the Declaration of Independence, per se, is of no help with any of this, whereas evoking natural law is only helpful in ways that reveal its own limitations as a foundation for both human rights and foreign policy in our interconnected age.

National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER NEHRING
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

Eduardo Frei, the U.S. Embassy, and the Election of Salvador Allende

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nixon Administration ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Salvador Allende ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This chapter describes the efforts by the United States and Eduardo Frei to prevent Salvador Allende from attaining the presidency. The Nixon administration, after choosing not to involve itself in the 1970 presidential race to the extent the Johnson administration had in the 1964 election, reacted with great alacrity to Allende's victory in the popular election. Richard Nixon himself instructed CIA director Richard Helms to conduct covert operations in Chile, behind Ambassador Korry's back. In addition, Chilean politicians, particularly Christian Democrats of the Frei line, tried or at least explored ways of averting an Allende victory and sought for that purpose the support of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Though many of the documents that tell this part of the story have been available to researchers since at least the early 2000s, only one scholarly work has treated these attempts by Chilean politicians, especially Eduardo Frei, in depth. The tendency of scholars of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War to assume rather uncritically that the only decisions that mattered were taken in Washington has narrowed the perspectives from which the history of Cold War Chilean politics has been studied and interpreted.

Introduction: The Korean War in Britain

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Grace Huxford
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social History ◽  
Korean War ◽  
British History ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This introduction first gives an overview of Korean War historiography alongside a summary of the war itself, before exploring the position of the Korean War and the Cold War in British history-writing. It highlights how selfhood and citizenship have emerged as growing categories of analysis in Cold War studies and argues why it is important to consider them in the context of post-1945 Britain. It closes by exploring the challenges and possibilities of writing the social history of warfare and bringing domestic and military ‘spheres’ together in a meaningful way.

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