Red Internationalism
Anti-Imperialism and Human Rights in the Global Sixties and Seventies

Shows how human rights displaced anti-imperialism as the dominant framework for changing the world in the 1960s and 1970s.

Salar Mohandesi (Author)

9781316513798, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 February 2023

354 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.65 kg

'Salar Mohandesi focuses on an inordinately important moment in the history of the left: the revival of radical traditions and anti-imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s. More crucially yet, in the last third of Red Internationalism, the author describes and analyzes how the anti-imperialism of the half-dozen years after 1968 eventually gave away rather rapidly to a concern, above all else, with humanitarian interventionism in the conflicts of the day … Red Internationalism deserves the widest possible diffusion and maximal attention.' Gerd-Rainer Horn, History of European Ideas

In Red Internationalism, Salar Mohandesi returns to the Vietnam War to offer a new interpretation of the transnational left's most transformative years. In the 1960s, radicals mobilized ideas from the early twentieth century to reinvent a critique of imperialism that promised not only to end the war but also to overthrow the global system that made such wars possible. Focusing on encounters between French, American, and Vietnamese radicals, Mohandesi explores how their struggles did change the world, but in unexpected ways that allowed human rights to increasingly displace anti-imperialism as the dominant idiom of internationalism. When anti-imperialism collapsed in the 1970s, human rights emerged as a hegemonic alternative channeling anti-imperialism's aspirations while rejecting systemic change. Approaching human rights as neither transhistorical truth nor cynical imperialist ruse but instead as a symptom of anti-imperialism's epochal crisis, Red Internationalism dramatizes a shift that continues to affect prospects for emancipatory political change in the future.

Introduction
Overture: Lenin's shadow
1. Internationalism
2. Anti-imperialism
3. Revolution
4. Repression
5. Crisis
6. Human rights
Coda: return of the repressed.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], History of ideas [JFCX], History of the Americas [HBJK], European history [HBJD], History [HB]