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Human Rights in Our Own Backyard
Most Americans assume that the United States provides a gold standard for human rights-a 2007 survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believed that \"the U.S. does a better job than most countries when it comes to protecting human rights.\" As well, discussions among scholars and public officials in the United States frame human rights issues as concerning people, policies, or practices \"over there.\" By contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that many of the greatest immediate and structural threats to human rights, and some of the most significant efforts to realize human rights in practice, can be found in our own backyard.
Human Rights in Our Own Backyardexamines the state of human rights and responses to human rights issues, drawing on sociological literature and perspectives to interrogate assumptions of American exceptionalism. How do people in the U.S. address human rights issues? What strategies have they adopted, and how successful have these strategies been? Essays are organized around key conventions of human rights, focusing on the relationships between human rights and justice, the state and the individual, civil rights and human rights, and group rights versus individual rights. The contributors are united by a common conception of the human rights enterprise as a process involving not only state-defined and implemented rights but also human rights from below as promoted by activists.
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Freedom on fire : human rights wars and America's response
As the chief human rights official of the Clinton Administration, John Shattuck faced far-flung challenges. Disasters were exploding simultaneously--genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia, murder and atrocities in Haiti, repression in China, brutal ethnic wars, and failed states in other parts of the world. But America was mired in conflicting priorities and was reluctant to act. What were Shattuck and his allies to do? This is the story of their struggle inside the U.S. government over how to respond. Shattuck tells what was tried and what was learned as he and other human rights hawks worked to change the Clinton Administration's human rights policy from disengagement to saving lives and bringing war criminals to justice. He records his frustrations and disappointments, as well as the successes achieved in moving human rights to the center of U.S. foreign policy. Shattuck was at the heart of the action. He was the first official to interview the survivors of Srebrenica. He confronted Milosevic in Belgrade. He was a key player in bringing the leaders of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda to justice. He pushed from the inside for an American response to the crisis of the Haitian boat people. He pressed for the release of political prisoners in China. His book is both an insider's account and a detailed prescription for preventing such wars in the future. Shattuck criticizes the Bush Administration's approach, which he says undermines human rights at home and around the world. He argues that human rights wars are breeding grounds for terrorism. Freedom on Fire describes the shifting challenges of global leadership in a world of explosive hatreds and deepening inequalities.
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Reclaiming American virtue : the human rights revolution of the 1970s
Human rights emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam trauma, Barbara Keys shows. Instead of looking inward for renewal, Americans looked outward for ways to restore their moral leadership. From world's judge to world's policeman was a small step, and intervention in the name of human rights because a cause both the left and right could embrace.
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Refuge beyond reach : how rich democracies repel asylum seekers
\"In Refuge beyond Reach, David Scott FitzGerald traces the origin and development of the practices deployed by governments to deter asylum seekers from the 1970s to the present. FitzGerald draws on official government documents, information obtained via WikiLeaks and FOIA requests from the CIA, and interviews with asylum seekers to systematically analyze the policies associated with the remote control of asylum seekers. He shows how the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia comply with the letter of law while violating the spirit of those laws through a range of remote control practices: the dome, the moat, the buffer, the cage, and the barbican. Remote control flourishes in secrecy behind the closed doors of consulates and airport terminals and in the anonymity of the seas and remote border regions. These policies may violate law, but Fitzgerald identifies some pressure points. Bilateral relationships, an autonomous judiciary enforcing rights, and oversight by transnational civil society watchdogs can temper the worst abuses\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere
During the first quarter-century of the Cold War, upholding human rights was rarely a priority in U.S. policy toward Latin America. Seeking to protect U.S. national security, American policymakers quietly cultivated relations with politically ambitious Latin American militaries-a strategy clearly evident in the Ford administration's tacit support of state-sanctioned terror in Argentina following the 1976 military coup d'état. By the mid-1970s, however, the blossoming human rights movement in the United States posed a serious threat to the maintenance of close U.S. ties to anticommunist, right-wing military regimes.
The competition between cold warriors and human rights advocates culminated in a fierce struggle to define U.S. policy during the Jimmy Carter presidency. InThe Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, William Michael Schmidli argues that Argentina emerged as the defining test case of Carter's promise to bring human rights to the center of his administration's foreign policy. Entering the Oval Office at the height of the kidnapping, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of Argentines by the military government, Carter set out to dramatically shift U.S. policy from subtle support to public condemnation of human rights violation. But could the administration elicit human rights improvements in the face of a zealous military dictatorship, rising Cold War tension, and domestic political opposition? By grappling with the disparate actors engaged in the struggle over human rights, including civil rights activists, second-wave feminists, chicano/a activists, religious progressives, members of the New Right, conservative cold warriors, and business leaders, Schmidli utilizes unique interviews with U.S. and Argentine actors as well as newly declassified archives to offer a telling analysis of the rise, efficacy, and limits of human rights in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War.
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Globalizing Human Rights
Globalizing Human Rights explores the complexities of the role human rights played in U.S.-Soviet relations during the 1970s and 1980s. It will show how private citizens exploited the larger effects of contemporary globalization and the language of the Final Act to enlist the U.S. government in a global campaign against Soviet/Eastern European human rights violations. A careful examination of this development shows the limitations of existing literature on the Reagan and Carter administrations' efforts to promote internal reform in USSR. It also reveals how the Carter administration and private citizens, not Western European governments, played the most important role in making the issue of human rights a fundamental aspect of Cold War competition. Even more important, it illustrates how each administration made the support of non-governmental human rights activities an integral element of its overall approach to weakening the international appeal of the USSR.
In addition to looking at the behavior of the U.S. government, this work also highlights the limitations of arguments that focus on the inherent weakness of Soviet dissent during the early to mid 1980s. In the case of the USSR, it devotes considerable attention to why Soviet leaders failed to revive the international reputation of their multinational empire in face of consistent human rights critiques. It also documents the crucial role that private citizens played in shaping Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to reform Soviet-style socialism.
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