| Summary: | This dissertation offers the first archivally grounded historical study of the critical place of the Americas in the rise of global human rights politics in the "long 1970s." Through case studies in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the United States, it explores how and why transnational activists made the revolutionary claim that international human rights superseded the sovereignty of the nation-state. In doing so, it traces the global shift from a maximalist politics of revolution to a minimalist politics of salvation---the protection of an individual's right to be free from torture, disappearance, arbitrary detention, and execution.?
This dissertation transforms our understanding of international and human rights history in three ways. First, it shifts the analytical lens for looking at human rights history away from Euro-America to focus on the transnational sphere of the Americas. Second, it demonstrates how activists cobbled together transnational coalitions to innovate new political discourses and forms of mobilization in the name of individual human rights, moving from a politics of revolution to a politics of salvation. And third, it explores how transnational activists in the 1970s began to envision a world in which sovereign borders mattered less than they once did and the protection of individual human rights became paramount.
Drawing on state and non-state archival collections in eight countries in the Americas and Europe, as well as oral interviews, the study links the experiences of activists and organizations from both the South and North. It analyzes how an array of transnational actors---from church and solidarity activists, political exiles and members of Amnesty International to Ford Foundation officers, international lawyers, and bureaucrats at the United Nations and the Organization of American States---gave meaning to global human rights norms. For arguably the first time in the 1970s, global norms were translated into human rights practice. It examines how transnational activists enmeshed with local actors not only in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, but also in cosmopolitan cities such as Geneva, London, and Mexico City. It shows how the South American political exile, in both informing and animating the efforts of activists, was central to the growth of transnational human rights activism.
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