From Helsinki to Human Rights Watch: How an American Cold War Monitoring Group Became an International Human Rights Institution

Download PDF On September 7, 2010, George Soros gave Human Rights Watch (HRW) a $100 million grant, the largest in its history. “I’m afraid the United States has lost the moral high ground under the Bush administration, but the principles that Human Rights Watch promotes have not lost their universal applicability,” he said. “So to be more effective, I think the organization has to be seen as more international, less an American organization.”1 Today, it is taken for granted that HRW’s scope should be international Continue reading →

Shanghai as a City of Juxtapositions

According to a variety of texts—from guidebooks and travel accounts to, at least by inference, novels and later films—what made a trip to Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries special was the way one encountered there a jumble of people from, and physical elements linked to, various parts of the world. It was, as boosters and travelers both liked to stress, a place of great cultural diversity, where the East and West were juxtaposed in special ways. This sense of the city Continue reading → Continue reading →

Interview with Greg Girard

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: How do you see your Phantom Shanghai fitting in with—or perhaps challenging—the sketch I’ve offered in this issue of the city moving from one defined more by juxtapositions of cultures to one in which juxtapositions of eras is as important?1 I’ve left some important things out, of course, such as juxtapositions of classes, something that is related to both of the other sorts of juxtaposition. Greg Girard: Shanghai’s past as a city run by Westerners continues to fascinate Westerners and others, and there Continue reading → Continue reading →

Beyond Sticks and Carrots: Local Agency in Counterinsurgency

The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 David French, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. x + 283 pp. Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency Laleh Khalili, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. xiii + 347 pp. Counterinsurgency—in theory and practice—has made a stunning comeback after its high point from the wars of liberation in the 1950s to the dying embers of the Iberian empires in the 1970s. While their wounds were still fresh, those episodes, whose most infamous cases include the wars of national Continue reading → Continue reading →

Scholar, Pope, Soldier, Spy

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present Max Boot, New York: Liveright, 2013. xxiv + 784 pp. All In: The Education of General David Petraeus Paula Broadwell with Vernon Loeb, New York: Penguin, 2012. xxiv + 394 pp. The Fourth Star: Four Generals and Their Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army David Cloud and Greg Jaffe, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009. 330 pp. The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the Continue reading → Continue reading →

On the Poverty and Possibility of Human Rights in Latin American History

Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America Jessica Stites Mor, ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. x + 264 pp. We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States James N. Green Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. xiv + 472 pp. If the global history of human rights has expanded considerably in the past ten years, much of it still remains unwritten.1 This is especially the case when it comes to Latin America. Indeed, Latin Continue reading → Continue reading →

Discussion: Cartographies of the Absolute by Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle

Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s forthcoming book, Cartographies of the Absolute, addresses the proliferation of works in the visual arts, film and literature that seek to tackle the representation of contemporary capitalism. Their research, which began in 2009 with a collaborative text on the HBO series The Wire, forms a critical survey of works that “totalize” current conditions and look to “thematize those facets of social existence which are particularly symptomatic of the trends and tensions in today’s political economy: financial markets, logistical complexes, commodity chains, and so on.” Inherent in this turn Continue reading →

CfA: Global Humanitarianism Research Academy 2015

The international Global Humanitarianism | Research Academy (GHRA) offers research training to advanced PhD candidates and early postdocs. It combines academic sessions at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz and the Imperial and Global History Centre at the University of Exeter with archival sessions at the Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. The Research Academy addresses early career researchers who are working in the related fields of humanitarianism, international humanitarian law, peace and conflict studies as well as human rights covering the period from the 18th to the 20th century. It supports scholarship on Continue reading →

Between Communal Survival and National Aspiration: Armenian Genocide Refugees, the League of Nations, and the Practices of Interwar Humanitarianism

While the cause of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire had played an important role in shaping Western attitudes and ideas about humanitarian intervention and national self-determination, the collapse of efforts to create an Armenian state in the wake of genocide and World War I led the nascent League of Nations to elaborate efforts within the repertoire of humanitarianism to preserve the Armenians as a distinct community. Those efforts bring into relief evolving interwar thought and policies about refugees, human trafficking, and the place of international institutions in the protection of civilians. The practical failures of the League’s projects provided a field in which “rights talk” could take place and the modern refugee régime emerge. Continue reading →