Sovereign Emergencies
Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics

Shows how Latin America was the crucible of the global human rights revolution of the 1970s.

Patrick William Kelly (Author)

9781107163249, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 May 2018

334 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.4 cm, 0.58 kg

'Sovereign Emergencies is a fantastic read. It foregrounds Latin America in the human rights revolution of the 1970s, o?ers insightful comments about the role of Latin American exiles in this revolution, includes fascinating digressions about testimonial truth, and, all in all, provides a successful model to those interested in writing empirically grounded transnational histories.' Alfonso Salgado, Journal of Contemporary History

The concern over rising state violence, above all in Latin America, triggered an unprecedented turn to a global politics of human rights in the 1970s. Patrick William Kelly argues that Latin America played the most pivotal role in these sweeping changes, for it was both the target of human rights advocacy and the site of a series of significant developments for regional and global human rights politics. Drawing on case studies of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, Kelly examines the crystallization of new understandings of sovereignty and social activism based on individual human rights. Activists and politicians articulated a new practice of human rights that blurred the borders of the nation-state to endow an individual with a set of rights protected by international law. Yet the rights revolution came at a cost: the Marxist critique of US imperialism and global capitalism was slowly supplanted by the minimalist plea not to be tortured.

List of figures
Introduction
1. Torture in Brazil
2. The emergency in Chile
3. Transnational solidarity
4. Redefining sovereignty
5. The origins of American human rights activism
6. The global specter of Argentina's disappeared
7. Argentina and the inter-American system
Epilogue: the promise and limits of the human rights cascade
Index.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], History of the Americas [HBJK], General & world history [HBG]