Download or read book Understanding U S Human Rights Policy written by Clair Apodaca and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of the complex and often vexing problem of understanding the formation of US human rights policy over the past thirty-five years, a period during which concern for human rights became a major factor in foreign policy decision-making. Clair Apodaca demonstrates that the history of American human rights policy is a series of different paradoxes that change depending on the presidential administration, showing that far from immobilizing the progression of a genuine and functioning human rights policy, these paradoxes have actually helped to improve the human rights protections over the years. Readers will find in a single volume a historically informed, argument driven account of the erratic evolution of US human rights policy since the Nixon administration. Understanding U.S. Human Rights Policy will be an essential supplement in courses on human rights, foreign policy analysis and decision-making, and the history of US foreign policy.
Download or read book Mixed Signals written by Kathryn Sikkink and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nowhere did two understandings of U.S. identity—human rights and anticommunism—come more in conflict with each other than they did in Latin America. To refocus U.S. policy on human rights and democracy required a rethinking of U.S. policy as a whole. It required policy makers to choose between policies designed to defeat communism at any cost and those that remain within the bounds of the rule of law."—from the Introduction Kathryn Sikkink believes that the adoption of human rights policy represents a positive change in the relationship between the United States and Latin America. In Mixed Signals she traces a gradual but remarkable shift in U.S. foreign policy over the last generation. By the 1970s, an unthinking anticommunist stance had tarnished the reputation of the U.S. government throughout Latin America, associating Washington with tyrannical and often brutally murderous regimes. Sikkink recounts the reemergence of human rights as a substantive concern, showing how external pressures from activist groups and the institution of a human rights bureau inside the State Department have combined to remake Washington's agenda, and its image, in Latin America. The current war against terrorism, Sikkink warns, could repeat the mistakes of the past unless we insist that the struggle against terrorism be conducted with respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Download or read book Implementing U S Human Rights Policy written by Debra Liang-Fenton and published by US Institute of Peace Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1970s, the promotion of human rights has been an explicit goal of U.S. foreign policy. Successive presidents have joined with senators and representatives, hundreds of NGOs, and millions of ordinary citizens in deploring human rights abuses and urging that American power and influence be used to right such wrongs. Vigorous debates, bold declarations, and well-crafted legislation have shaped numerous policies designed to counter abuses and promote U.S. values across the globe.But have such policies actually worked?This incomparable volume answers that question by spotlighting no fewer than 14 cases spanning four continents and 25 years. In each case, a distinguished author charts efforts to implement U.S. policy and highlights the problems encountered. The chapters explore the interaction between competing moral, economic, and security considerations; examine the different challenges facing policymakers in Washington and practitioners in-country; and assess what worked, what did not work, and why. Throughout, the emphasis is on discovering useful lessons and offering practical advice to those considering new initiatives or trying to improve existing efforts.Packed with insights, "Implementing U.S. Human Rights Policy" offers an even-handed and highly readable synopsis of the major human rights challenges of our times.
Download or read book American Exceptionalism Reconsidered written by David P. Forsythe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the US really exceptional in terms of its willingness to take universal human rights seriously? According to the rhetoric of American political leaders, the United States has a unique and lasting commitment to human rights principles and to a liberal world order centered on rule of law and human dignity. But when push comes to shove—most recently in Libya and Syria--the United States failed to stop atrocities and dithered as disorder spread in both places. This book takes on the myths surrounding US foreign policy and the future of world order. Weighing impulses toward parochial nationalism against the ideal of cosmopolitan internationalism, the authors posit that what may be emerging is a new brand of American globalism, or a foreign policy that gives primacy to national self-interest but does so with considerable interest in and genuine attention to universal human rights and a willingness to suffer and pay for those outside its borders—at least on occasion. The occasions of exception—such as Libya and Syria—provide case studies for critical analysis and allow the authors to look to emerging dominant powers, especially China, for indicators of new challenges to the commitment to universal human rights and humanitarian affairs in the context of the ongoing clash between liberalism and realism. The book is guided by four central questions: 1) What is the relationship between cosmopolitan international standards and narrow national self-interest in US policy on human rights and humanitarian affairs? 2) What is the role of American public opinion and does it play any significant role in shaping US policy in this dialectical clash? 3) Beyond public opinion, what other factors account for the shifting interplay of liberal and realist inclinations in Washington policy making? 4) In the 21st century and as global power shifts, what are the current views and policies of other countries when it comes to the application of human rights and humanitarian affairs?
Download or read book Bait and Switch written by Julie Mertus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although our era is marked by human rights rhetoric, human wrongs continue to be committed with impunity, and the idea of human rights is becoming impoverished.
Download or read book Freedom on the Offensive written by William Michael Schmidli and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century. Reagan used democracy promotion to refashion the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had collapsed in the late 1960s amid opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1980s, the initiative led to a greater institutionalization of human rights—narrowly defined to include political rights and civil liberties and to exclude social and economic rights—as a US foreign policy priority. Democracy promotion thus served to legitimize a distinctive form of US interventionism and to underpin the Reagan administration's aggressive Cold War foreign policies. Drawing on newly available archival materials, and featuring a range of perspectives from top-level policymakers and politicians to grassroots activists and militants, this study makes a defining contribution to our understanding of human rights ideas and the projection of American power during the final decade of the Cold War. Using Reagan's undeclared war on Nicaragua as a case study in US interventionism, Freedom on the Offensive explores how democracy promotion emerged as the centerpiece of an increasingly robust US human rights agenda. Yet, this initiative also became intertwined with deeply undemocratic practices that misled the American people, violated US law, and contributed to immense human and material destruction. Pursued through civil society or low-cost military interventions and rooted in the neoliberal imperatives of US-led globalization, Reagan's democracy promotion initiative had major implications for post–Cold War US foreign policy.
Download or read book Implementing U S Human Rights Policy written by Debra Liang-Fenton and published by US Institute of Peace Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1970s, the promotion of human rights has been an explicit goal of U.S. foreign policy. Successive presidents have joined with senators and representatives, hundreds of NGOs, and millions of ordinary citizens in deploring human rights abuses and urging that American power and influence be used to right such wrongs. Vigorous debates, bold declarations, and well-crafted legislation have shaped numerous policies designed to counter abuses and promote U.S. values across the globe. But have such policies actually worked? This incomparable volume answers that question by spotlighting no fewer than 14 cases spanning four continents and 25 years. In each case, a distinguished author charts efforts to implement U.S. policy and highlights the problems encountered. The chapters explore the interaction between competing moral, economic, and security considerations; examine the different challenges facing policymakers in Washington and practitioners in-country; and assess what worked, what did not work, and why. Throughout, the emphasis is on discovering useful lessons and offering practical advice to those considering new initiatives or trying to improve existing efforts. Packed with insights, Implementing U.S. Human Rights Policy offers an even-handed and highly readable synopsis of the major human rights challenges of our times.
Download or read book U S Human Rights Policy written by Paula Dobriansky and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Principles in Power written by Vanessa Walker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.
Download or read book Human Rights and U S Foreign Policy written by Clair Apodaca and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-08 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy provides a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of the complex and often vexing problem of understanding the formation of U.S. human rights policy. The proper place of human rights and fundamental freedoms in U.S. foreign policy has long been debated among scholars, politicians, and the American public. Clair Apodaca argues that the history of U.S.human rights policy unfolds as a series of prevarications that are the result of presidential preferences, along with the conflict and cooperation among bureaucratic actors. Through a series of chapters devoted to U.S. presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to the present, she delivers a comprehensive historical, social, and cultural context to understand the development and implementation of U.S. human rights policy. For each administration, she pays close attention to how ideology, bureaucratic politics, lobbying, and competition affect the inclusion or exclusion of human rights in the economic and military aid allocation decisions of the United States. She further demonstrates that from the inception of U.S. human rights policy, presidents have attempted to tell only part of the truth or to reformulate the truth by redefining the meaning of the terms "human rights," "democracy," or "torture," for example. In this way, human rights policy has been about prevarication. Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy is a key text for students, which will appeal to all readers who will find a historically informed, argument driven account of the erratic evolution of U.S. human rights policy since the Nixon Administration.
Download or read book The Endtimes of Human Rights written by Stephen Hopgood and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We are living through the endtimes of the civilizing mission. The ineffectual International Criminal Court and its disastrous first prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, along with the failure in Syria of the Responsibility to Protect are the latest pieces of evidence not of transient misfortunes but of fatal structural defects in international humanism. Whether it is the increase in deadly attacks on aid workers, the torture and 'disappearing' of al-Qaeda suspects by American officials, the flouting of international law by states such as Sri Lanka and Sudan, or the shambles of the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Phnom Penh, the prospect of one world under secular human rights law is receding. What seemed like a dawn is in fact a sunset. The foundations of universal liberal norms and global governance are crumbling."—from The Endtimes of Human Rights In a book that is at once passionate and provocative, Stephen Hopgood argues, against the conventional wisdom, that the idea of universal human rights has become not only ill adapted to current realities but also overambitious and unresponsive. A shift in the global balance of power away from the United States further undermines the foundations on which the global human rights regime is based. American decline exposes the contradictions, hypocrisies and weaknesses behind the attempt to enforce this regime around the world and opens the way for resurgent religious and sovereign actors to challenge human rights. Historically, Hopgood writes, universal humanist norms inspired a sense of secular religiosity among the new middle classes of a rapidly modernizing Europe. Human rights were the product of a particular worldview (Western European and Christian) and specific historical moments (humanitarianism in the nineteenth century, the aftermath of the Holocaust). They were an antidote to a troubling contradiction—the coexistence of a belief in progress with horrifying violence and growing inequality. The obsolescence of that founding purpose in the modern globalized world has, Hopgood asserts, transformed the institutions created to perform it, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and recently the International Criminal Court, into self-perpetuating structures of intermittent power and authority that mask their lack of democratic legitimacy and systematic ineffectiveness. At their best, they provide relief in extraordinary situations of great distress; otherwise they are serving up a mixture of false hope and unaccountability sustained by “human rights” as a global brand. The Endtimes of Human Rights is sure to be controversial. Hopgood makes a plea for a new understanding of where hope lies for human rights, a plea that mourns the promise but rejects the reality of universalism in favor of a less predictable encounter with the diverse realities of today’s multipolar world.
Download or read book Bringing Human Rights Home written by Cynthia Soohoo and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout its history, America's policies have alternatively embraced human rights, regarded them with ambivalence, or rejected them out of hand. The essays in this volume put these shifting political winds into a larger historical perspective, from the country's very beginnings to the present day.
Download or read book Aid Imperium written by Salvador Santino Fulo Regilme and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-11-03 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How US foreign policy affects state repression
Download or read book U s Human Rights Policy written by P. DOBRIANSKY and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Human Rights and U S Policy in the Multilateral Development Banks written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. Subcommittee on International Development Institutions and Finance and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book U S human rights policy toward the Soviet Union written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere written by William Michael Schmidli and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In The 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.
