From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy Sarah B. Snyder (review)

The history of human rights, perhaps surprisingly, emerged relatively recently as a field of scholarly inquiry.¹ Historians began publishing widely on the topic only in the past decade and, as historian Barbara Keys noted, scholars of US foreign relations have been "among the most avid" contributors to fill the void in this burgeoning field.² Sarah Snyder became one such pioneer in 2011 when she published her first book, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network.³ In that volume, Snyder examines how non-state actors used the passage of the Helsinki Act of 1975 to promote a human rights agenda as a central element in East-West diplomacy, which helped lead to the end of the Cold War.

In her latest book, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy, Snyder looks again to nonstate actors to examine how human rights emerged—this time as a central part of the US foreign policymaking apparatus. Eschewing claims from Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia that human rights' true rise can be traced to the 1970s, Snyder is part of a group of historians, which includes Steven L.B Jensen and Roland Burke, who are looking to the 1960s to locate the origins of modern human rights.⁴ While Jensen and Burke are more concerned with global events in their analyses of the earlier decade, the former examining the impact of decolonization and the latter looking to the terminal years of liberal postcolonialism, Snyder focuses on how US nonstate actors and low level diplomats played a pivotal role in bringing human rights to the forefront of US policymaking, and how their actions continues to have lasting relevance.

With this project, Snyder contests the prevailing emphasis on Jimmy Carter's presidential anointment that "our commitment to human rights must be absolute" to locate when human rights had finally arrived on the US foreign policy scene. Instead, Snyder shows how a diverse set of activists, missionaries, academics, and bureaucrats laid the groundwork for Carter's inaugural claims in the "long 1960s"—a period she defines as John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 through the end of Gerald Ford's presidency in January 1977. By investigating various actors' personal connections, racial identity, and transnational ties in a diverse set of ideological and geographical case studies, she argues that the long 1960s set the stage for the "institutionalization of human rights in US foreign policy and the expansion of human rights activism" in subsequent decades.⁵

In reexamining the temporal origins of human rights in US foreign policy, Snyder also points to an important geographic shift that occurred, which re-centered human rights activism in the US from New York to Washington DC in the 1960s. As Snyder explains, this change is significant because it shows how activists who cared about global rights stopped appealing to the United Nations and foreign governments to advocate for moral claims abroad. Instead, their frustration and disillusionment with a UN-centered approach led them to see the US as an important arbiter that could marshal its power in support of human rights to effect change.

These two important historiographical contributions are illustrated through diverse emblematic case studies. Chapter one examines how human rights became an issue in US-Soviet relations. According to Snyder, pressure on the US foreign policy establishment arose from personal ties—particularly Soviet-Jewish connections—that led to the formation of NGOs, student groups, and mass demonstrations around the issue. This mobilization ended in Senator Henry Jackson's push to pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which limited trade with communist countries that restricted freedom of emigration and other human rights abuses. In Chapter Two, Snyder focuses on Africa, studying American activism against Southern Rhodesia's minority-ruled, racially discriminatory government. In this context, US citizens...