NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "A Curious Grapevine", and: Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (review)

NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "A Curious Grapevine" by William Korey (St. Martin's Press: New York, 1998)

Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, by Margaret E. Keck & Kathryn Sikkink (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1998).

The year 1998 brought a bumper crop of books on human rights. The fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) provided the impetus to rethink how the world has changed, thanks to the UDHR. Obviously, the quality and depth of these books varied markedly. Most sank with nary a notice in the August pages of this journal, but some, including those reviewed here, deserve summary, commentary, and praise.

NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a sprawling study of the origins and accomplishments of nongovernmental organizations (largely US-based). William Korey documents their effectiveness "in making human rights a vibrant and major force on the agenda of international diplomacy and discourse." ¹ He argues that a coalescence of national and nongovernmental interests is most likely to bring change. Hence, shifts in American foreign policy and changes in global consciousness brought by NGO pressure are central to NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Activists Beyond Borders is a comparative work, with the majority of its pages devoted to analysis of networks active in Latin America, in promoting environmental advocacy, or in combating violence against women. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink do not describe individual NGOs in detail, as Korey does; rather, they illustrate more general arguments about groups of NGOs with pithy examples. For them, the webs of connections human rights groups have formed constitute the heart of their story. In showing why these networks formed and how these networks succeed, Keck and Sikkink have advanced theoretical analysis.

Korey, too, is well aware of the importance of links among human rights NGOs. The unusual subtitle Korey utilizes stems from the noted first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt used the "curious grapevine" metaphor when the UN's Third Committee finished its discussion of the draft UDHR on 7 December 1948. Exactly seven years after the "day of infamy" her husband had decried, Mrs. Roosevelt presciently asserted that a "curious grapevine" would carry word of the Declaration throughout the world. Information, she continued, "may seep in even when governments are not so anxious for it." ² "Network" says the same thing, albeit in less striking language. In eroding the sovereign powers of individual governments, activists and organizations have transformed global politics strikingly in a relatively brief span of time. Their willingness to draw together for specific objectives helps explain this success.

The ability to ferret out information about human rights abuses and spread it around the world constitutes a central theme of both books under review. NGOs are, in large measure, providers of data. They seek to gather, verify, and above all disseminate information. They fight with pen, not sword, believing in the efficacy of the written word to change government policies. NGOs are involved in "promoting change by reporting facts," ³ a strategy with antecedents well before the creation of the United Nations--as Keck and Sikkink show. Curiously, a significantly larger part of their book is devoted to pre-1945 events than is the case for Korey's volume. Activists Beyond Borders summarizes international campaigns to end slavery and the slave trade, to achieve women's suffrage, and to end culturally specific practices of foot-binding and female circumcision; these efforts occupy nearly twenty percent of Activists Beyond Borders. By contrast, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives barely two pages to the history of the Anti-Slavery Society (whose title was lengthened by adding "for the Protection of Human Rights) ⁴ and the "pioneer" International League for Human...