Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics
Jean H. Quataert
376 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus.
Paper 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2127-5 | $24.95s | £16.50 | Add to cart
Ebook 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0612-8 | $24.95s | £16.50 | About | Add to cart
A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series
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"An ambitious and compelling book. Advocating Dignity offers an innovative conceptual framework to provide one of the first major historical accounts of the global human rights revolutions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."—Mark Bradley, University of Chicago
In Advocating Dignity, Jean H. Quataert explores the emergence, development, and impact of the human rights revolution following World War II. Intertwining popular local and national mobilizations for rights with ongoing developments of a formal international system of rights monitoring in the United Nations, Quataert argues that human rights advocacy networks have been a vital dimension of international political developments since 1945. Recalling the popular slogan "Think globally, act locally," she contends that postwar human rights have been shaped by the efforts of people at the grassroots. She shows that human rights politics are constituted locally and reinforced by transnational linkages in international society. The U.N. system is continuously reinvigorated and strengthened by its ties to local individuals, organizations, and groups engaged in day-to-day rights advocacy. This daily work, in turn, is supported by the ongoing activities from above.
Quataert establishes the global contexts for the historical unfolding of human rights advocacy through thorough studies of such cases as the Soviet dissident movement, the mothers' demonstrations in Argentina, the transnational antiapartheid campaign, and coalitions for gender and economic justice. Drawing from many fields of inquiry, including legal studies, philosophy, international relations theory, political science, and gender history, Advocating Dignity is an innovative work that narrates the hopes and bitter struggles that have altered the course of international and domestic relations over the past sixty years.
Jean H. Quataert is Professor of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and author of several books, including Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813-1916.