Words Are Not Enough

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-111
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Latin American ◽  
First Year ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the early development of the Carter administration's human rights agenda, built in tandem with a new approach to U.S.–Latin American relations during its first year in office. From the outset, the Carter administration envisioned a human rights policy that would simultaneously mitigate human rights violations abroad, build U.S. credibility and stature in the international sphere by reasserting a moral and ideological pole of attraction, and signify a move away from the excessive secrecy and power of the Cold War presidency at home. Although Carter largely shared the premises of the Movement's vision, differences over the implementation and signifiers of this policy in high-level diplomacy created rifts between like-minded advocates and policy makers. Carter found himself grappling with the legacies of both U.S. intervention in the region and also congressional and public distrust stemming from past excesses of the Cold War presidency. The administration's options in implementing its policy were bounded by both past regional relations and human rights advocacy itself.

Principles in Power

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
International Power ◽  
The Cold War

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.

The Reagan Reinvention

2020 ◽  
pp. 205-248
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
First Year ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Military Aid ◽  
Policy Shift ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines the dramatic reinvention of U.S. human rights policy during Reagan's first year in office. The Carter administration pursued human rights as a corrective to U.S. interventionist legacies, emphasizing pluralism and eschewing regime change. The Reagan administration, in contrast, aggressively promoted human rights within a reinvigorated but narrow Cold War framework. This construction, championing a limited range of civil and political rights, downplayed the human rights violations of pro-American governments, focusing instead on what it considered the much greater moral flaws and violations of communist regimes. The Cold War framing of human rights under Reagan empowered a pairing of military power and moral values, leading the United States to not only not limit arms sales to governments but also recast military aid as a critical aspect of both hemispheric defense against communism and the advancement of human rights. The chapter studies this policy shift in the Reagan administration's first year in regard to Chile and Argentina.

scholarly journals The Case for Foreign Electoral Subversion

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Fabre
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractIt is widely alleged that President Putin's regime attempted to exercise influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is known that its Soviet predecessors funded Western communist parties for decades as a means to undermine noncommunist regimes. Similarly, the United States has a long history of interfering in the institutions and elections of its Latin American neighbors, as well as (at the height of the Cold War) its European allies. More recently, many believe that, absent U.S.-driven assistance, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia would have lost the 2000 Yugoslavian presidential election to Slobodan Milošević. As those examples suggest, attempting to subvert the democratic elections of a putatively sovereign country is a time-honored way of bending the latter's domestic and foreign policy to one's will. In this paper, I focus on the state-sponsored, nonviolent, nonkinetic subversion of nationwide elections (for short, subversion) through campaign and party financing, tampering with electoral registers, and conducting disinformation campaigns about candidates. I argue that, under certain conditions and subject to certain constraints, subversion is pro tanto justified as a means to prevent or end large-scale human rights violations.

Broadening the Cultural History of the Cold War: The Emergence of the Polish Workers' Defense Committee and the Rise of Human Rights

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 104-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Brier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
International Context ◽  
East European ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opposition Group ◽  
The Cold War

The historiography of the Cold War has witnessed a revived interest in non-material factors such as culture and ideology. Although this incipient cultural history of the Cold War has focused mainly on the period from 1945 until the early 1960s, the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 turned ideas into potent factors of international politics when East European opposition groups began to expose how their governments violated the accord's human rights provisions. By putting the emergence of one such opposition group, the Polish Workers' Defense Committee, in an international context, this article extends Cold War cultural history into the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how human rights ideas affected international and domestic politics. The Communist states' willingness to put up with the human rights provisions in the Helsinki Final Act was not sufficient to “shame” them internationally. Instead, what happened is that Western leftists, after encountering East European dissidents, increasingly perceived human rights as a precondition for the success of their own political project and hence revoked what Robert Horvath calls the “revolutionary privilege” long granted to Communist regimes. Because Communism's identity was so closely related to its struggle with the West, this criticism was particularly damaging. Only within the dynamics of a cultural framework from earlier stages of postwar history did transnational human rights advocacy become effective.

Human Rights, Democracy, and the Inescapability of Politics; or, Human Dignity Thick and Thin

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 358-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yehudah Mirsky
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Advisory Opinion ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
The Icj ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
Human Rights Advocacy ◽  
The Cold War

The essay places the ICJ opinion in a broader legal and political context and argues that the failure to distinguish between democratic and non-democratic regimes characterizing the ICJ advisory opinion reflects broader trends with potentially ruinous consequences for the enterprise of human rights promotion itself. The ICJ opinion's willful ignoring of Israel's democratic character yielded a tendentious and inconsistent ruling. By contrast the Israel High Court of Justice's decision invalidating portions of Israel's security wall reflects a healthy understanding of a democracy's needs and limitations, as reflected in that court's proportionality standard of review. The ICJ willingly blurred crucial distinctions between democratic regimes that genuinely adhere, however imperfectly, to principles of human rights in their own governance, and those states and actors that do not, a distinction made all the more imperative by the events of September 11.The judicialization of human rights in the post-Cold War era takes place against the background of a tensile relationship between human rights advocacy and democracy promotion during the Cold War. While human rights represent an essentially legal idea, democracy a political idea. In closing, the essay lays out one basic, hopefully workable, conceptual division of labor between human rights and democracy as complementary elements of a broader project of human dignity, in which human rights represents a “thin” universal conception of human dignity, while democracy offers a process whereby that conception can be “thickened” in various political, social and cultural contexts around the globe.

scholarly journals A Critical View of the Scholarly Discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian Problem

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Berdal Aral
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Palestinian Territories ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
State Of Israel

The scholarly discourse about Israel has at least two defects. First, although it is a colonial-settler state that has occupied the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine, it is still by and large treated as a “normal” state in the literature; and secondly, even the progressive scholars – who are very critical of Israel for is subjugation of Palestinian rights and massive breaches of human rights – have mostly confined their critique to the Palestinian territories occupied during the 1967 War. Therefore, the progressive scholarship ought to adopt a wider view of Israel’s irregular practices by extending its focus to the entirety of territories corresponding to the former Mandate of Palestine and the entirety of the history of the state of Israel in the context of its occupations, colonial policies, ethnic cleansing, population transfers, systematic racism and massive human rights violations against the Palestinian people. This “new” approach also requires, at least in the context of critical academics, an advocacy for multiple sanctions by international institutions, first and foremost, by the United Nations (UN), to be imposed against Israel as was the case with the Apartheid state of South Africa during the Cold War.  

Chile-US Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick William Kelly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring ◽  
The Cold War

The relationship between Chile and the United States pivoted on the intertwined questions of how much political and economic influence Americans would exert over Chile and the degree to which Chileans could chart their own path. Given Chile’s tradition of constitutional government and relative economic development, it established itself as a regional power player in Latin America. Unencumbered by direct US military interventions that marked the history of the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico, Chile was a leader in movements to promote Pan-Americanism, inter-American solidarity, and anti-imperialism. But the advent of the Cold War in the 1940s, and especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, brought an increase in bilateral tensions. The United States turned Chile into a “model democracy” for the Alliance for Progress, but frustration over its failures to enact meaningful social and economic reform polarized Chilean society, resulting in the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in 1970. The most contentious period in US-Chilean relations was during the Nixon administration when it worked, alongside anti-Allende Chileans, to destabilize Allende’s government, which the Chilean military overthrew on September 11, 1973. The Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), while anti-Communist, clashed with the United States over Pinochet’s radicalization of the Cold War and the issue of Chilean human rights abuses. The Reagan administration—which came to power on a platform that reversed the Carter administration’s critique of Chile—reversed course and began to support the return of democracy to Chile, which took place in 1990. Since then, Pinochet’s legacy of neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy looms large, overshadowed perhaps only by his unexpected role in fomenting a global culture of human rights that has ended the era of impunity for Latin American dictators.

Reluctant Cold Warriors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Kontorovich
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Accurate Analysis ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was created to help fight the Cold War, part of a broader mobilization of the social sciences for national security needs. The Soviet strategic challenge rested on the ability of its economy to produce large numbers of sophisticated weapons. The military sector was the dominant part of the economy, and the most successful one. However, a comprehensive survey of scholarship on the Soviet economy from 1948-1991 shows that it paid little attention to the military sector, compared to other less important parts of the economy. Soviet secrecy does not explain this pattern of neglect. Western scholars developed strained civilian interpretations for several aspects of the economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. A close reading of the economic literature, combined with insights from other disciplines, suggest three complementary explanations for civilianization of the Soviet economy. Soviet studies was a peripheral field in economics, and its practitioners sought recognition by pursuing the agenda of the mainstream discipline, however ill-fitting their subject. The Soviet economy was supposed to be about socialism, and the military sector appeared to be unrelated to that. By stressing the militarization, one risked being viewed as a Cold War monger. The conflict identified in this book between the incentives of academia and the demands of policy makers (to say nothing of accurate analysis) has broad relevance for national security uses of social science.

scholarly journals The Solved Conflict: Pope Francis and Liberation Theology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ole Jakob Løland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Pope Francis ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Gustavo Gutierrez ◽  
Global Church

AbstractThe battle for meaning and influence between Latin American liberations theologians and the Vatican was one of the most significant conflicts in the global Catholic church of the twentieth century. With the election of the Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio as head of the global church in 2013, the question about the legacy of liberation theology was actualized. The canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the pope’s approximation to the public figure of Gustavo Gutiérrez signaled a new approach to the liberation theology movement in the Vatican. This article argues that Pope Francis shares some of the main theological concerns as pontiff with liberation theology. Although the pope remains an outsider to liberation theology, he has in a sense solved the conflict between the Vatican and the Latin American social movement. Through an analysis of ecclesial documents and theological literature, his can be discerned on three levels. First, Pope Francis’ use of certain theological ideas from liberation theology has been made possible and less controversial by post-cold war contexts. Second, Pope Francis has contributed to the solution of this conflict through significant symbolic gestures rather than through a shift of official positions. Third, as Pope Francis, the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio has appropriated certain elements that are specific to liberation theology without acknowledging his intellectual debt to it.

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