Patrick William Kelly. Sovereign Emergencies

Patrick William Kelly’s Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics situates Latin America as the primary catalyst in the rise of international human rights discourse and practice during the 1970s and early 1980s. Latin America scholars have long known that state-perpetrated violence under authoritarian regimes in South America spurred and shaped the rise of late twentieth-century transnational human rights politics. Kelly’s synthesis traces the rise of international human rights politics in the Global North to growing awareness there of torture and forced disappearances in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Following in the footsteps of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), Kelly argues that the emergent international human rights politics of the 1970s emphasized individual rights protected by international law and eschewed anti-imperialist critiques of transnational capitalism’s role in the repression sweeping the region, replacing Marxists’ more thoroughgoing calls for change with minimalist pleas for individuals not to be tortured. Second, he posits that the development of transnational human rights practice during this period created “sovereign emergencies,” defined as “disruptions in international order caused by the misplaced faith dictators placed in sovereignty as an impenetrable shield, one that activists and diplomats began to pierce in the name of human rights in the 1970s” (5–6). Third, he emphasizes that the rise of international human rights politics and practice was a contingent and contested process of meaning making that arose from the “changing nature of the global Cold War in the 1970s” rather than from post–World War II decolonization (16).

Fundamental rights · Human rights · Human rights movement · International human rights law · International relations · Latin Americans · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Right to property · Sociology · Sovereignty · Torture · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law