The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States

Kenneth Cmiel

In the summer of 1996, the Nike Corporation was buffeted by claims that it mistreated its workers in Asian countries. This was part of a string of such complaints—all against corporations with headquarters in the United States, Canada, or western Europe but with work forces stretching around the globe. Nike responded by agreeing to sit down at the White House and negotiate international labor standards. Sitting at the negotiating table were representatives from Nike, other clothing manufacturers, the Clinton administration, and international labor unions. Also present were representatives from two human rights organizations: the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the Center for Human Rights of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center. While the setting as a whole is worth an essay, I want here to draw your attention to the human rights groups. Why were representatives of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights or the Kennedy center, without a dollar of their own capital in play and unelected by anyone in the whole sweet world, sitting at the table of what potentially were some of the most important international negotiations of the day?1	1
The answer has to do with the emergence of a politics of human rights in the last third of the twentieth century. For the first time since the early 1900s, a set of private organizations has been founded to reshape global practices. And this international civil society is not only interested in the labor policies of corporations like Nike. Human rights claims now challenge the exclusive control of nations over immigration policy. They have been instrumental in reawakening the world to the continued practice of torture. They have been used to attack customs such as female circumcision. Human rights claims have contributed to the delegitimation of Communist East Europe, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's Iran, and South American military dictatorships. By shifting the focus from the sovereignty of the people to the rights of individuals "regardless of nationality," Saskia Sassen notes, human rights are becoming "a force that can undermine the exclusive authority of the state over its nationals," contributing to the formation of a new international legal order.2	2
The history of this has not yet been written. In large part, this is because it does not fit the nation-state frame. Historians generally remain trained to and limited by the nation. Even historians hostile to the ideology of nationalism still usually work within the frame. Recent interest in "borders" has been especially useful in moving beyond some of these limitations, yet border studies do little to explain the rise of Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch, or other transnational organizations. If border studies explore the mixes and blends resulting from the interplay of local cultures, the modern practice of human rights politics conjures up the swirl of information and image around the globe. Human rights claims weave in and out of nations, coursing through them but not simply a part of them. It is no surprise that metaphors of "circuits," "networks," or "global flows" are now commonly used for this sort of activity.3	3
Just as much as the transnational flow of capital, the new human rights politics are a part of what has come to be called "globalization." And like transnational capital, human rights politics emerged during the 1970s. There are many stories still to be told about this—financial, ideological, political. Here I will examine just one strand: United States human rights activists, in tandem with partners around the world, devised ways to collect accurate accounts of some of the vilest behavior on earth that no one had bothered to document before. They invented ways to move this information to wherever activists had some chance to shame and pressure the perpetrators. Theirs was a politics of the global flow of key bits of fact.4	. . .