Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics by Patrick William Kelly (review)

The role of Latin American activists and thinkers in shaping international human rights ideas, politics, institutions, and rules has interested several scholars writing about the emergence of human-rights issues in the 1970s. Like most accounts, Kelly's spotlights the Southern Cone, maintaining that the multiple encounters between domestic and transnational activists occurring in the 1970s proved fateful for new ideals and practices of human rights. In one of the book's most interesting lines of arguments, Kelly tells the story of the complex process that led socialist activists from Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to abandon their projects of distributive justice and to embrace a minimalist utopia based on the invocation of an international platform of human rights.¹ Activists' political transformation occurred as a result of violent actions perpetrated by military governments of the three countries addressed in the book. The withdrawal from the pursuit of revolution to a modest goal of rights protection in light of the urgencies of the time was a "shift … from the politics of revolution to a politics of emergency" (7).

Kelly views his methodology for analyzing this politics of emergency, which ultimately turned into a permanent and long-term initiative for the left, as novel because it "provide[s] a model for transnational and global history" of human rights "based on multi-state, multi-archival research [drawing] on oral interviews" (12–13). More valuable than the painstaking documentation that underlies the book, however, is the heuristic device that Kelly employs to tell a compelling story about the different meanings that human-rights ideals had at the local, national, international, and transnational levels. Kelly focuses on specific encounters between local activists from the Southern Cone and individuals working in transnational organizations to construct his narrative about the nascent politics of human rights. Sometimes he underscores the voice of transnational activists as a means to understand the implications of the interaction; in other instances, he privileges the view of domestic activists. He also follows the path of Southern Cone exiles who moved to other countries, especially to the United States and Western Europe, carrying their political agendas to international arenas.

Tracing individuals and encounters, Kelly offers a model to deal with the challenges of salience and scale in human-rights historiography.² A human-rights agenda can comprise the panoply of ideals, institutions, rules, practices, and politics that activists embrace to advance their purposes. But because human rights can occur simultaneously at a regional, national, and international scale, their full implications can be difficult to grasp. Kelly's heuristic strategy effectively acknowledges and neutralizes these complications. Kelly's history of human rights implies that a grandiose coherent narrative is less important than a multiplicity of perspectives that can illuminate the contested processes of making meaning in transnational contexts.

The multiple meanings of human rights become clear in Kelly's narrative, especially in his provocative epilogue. But readers may also notice the last-utopia approach that underlies the book's story line. Kelly's heuristic devices allow him both to give prior works their due and to distance himself from their main conclusions. His third chapter, for example, shows that the retreat of socialism was not as simple as the last-utopia narrative suggests. Latin American activists at the alternative international tribunals in the 1970s (for instance, the Russell Tribunal, named for Bertrand Russell who organized it to investigate war crimes and human-rights violations), explicitly pursued a politics of solidarity close to socialism. Kelly might have discussed what happened at these forums, and how and why they became less important for Southern Cone activists vis-à-vis other opportunities.

Overall, Sovereign Emergencies is a rich kaleidoscope that emphasizes the importance of writing histories that underscore plurality in the formation of the ideas and practices that animate international politics. In doing so, Kelly offers a new view of...