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

For both specialists and newcomers, Sovereign Emergencies is a strong synthesis of what we know about how individuals and institutions built the idea and exercise of human rights across national boundaries. The author proposes to recover Latin American agency in the building of global human rights norms in the 1970s and to explain why that decade is so central to understanding the rise of human rights as a problem. With the exception of a scattershot conclusion that brings parts of the story up to 2007, the book is about the 1970s and early 1980s. Chapter 1 concerns how activists and clergy announced Brazilian military regime violence in a manner that entrenched torture as a global human rights issue. Three chapters focus on the Chilean dictatorship and the attendant transformation of United Nations and Organization of American States agencies into disruptors of the complacent claims of dictators that national sovereignty was a barrier against foreign criticisms. There is a chapter on the creation of a human rights solidarity movement in the United States followed by two chapters on dictatorship in Argentina and its international impact.

Despite the agility with which the author digests all of this, with the exception of the chapter on the United States and small details elsewhere, specialists will find little that is new in the author's argument. Part of the reason lies in the carefully constructed parameters of how the community of human rights scholars frequently tells this story—what's left in and what's left out. The result is a linear morality tale of evildoers, recalcitrant politicians outside Latin America, and heroic activists around the world that built a good human rights regime. Human rights cannot be understood, for example, without developing the counterweight of how military regimes confronted human rights criticisms. In so doing, they crafted policies and diplomacies that reduced their exposure to outside attack (as many authoritarians still do), and helped shape the international human rights regime. More important, in each of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, human rights were framed narrowly in a manner that excluded how LGBT, indigenous, religious (Jehovah's Witnesses, for example) and other communities understood their violent mistreatment by authorities.

To show long-term impact, Kelly suggests, but does not demonstrate, a connection between recent advances in LGBT rights and the 1970s human rights struggles. Moreover, he tells only part of each story.: "Employed to combat authoritarian regimes in the 1970s, Latin American gay activists picked up and capitalized [much more recently] on an established culture of human rights to push for equal treatment before the law" (p. 300). But what happens if we complicate the narrative? In Argentina, Kelly's LGBT rights narrative applies almost exclusively to the white urban middle-class. To be Trans in Argentina today frequently means poverty, violence, and no work outside the sex trade. Moreover, working-class LGBT Argentines of color outside middle-class city centers often face violent constraints on their lives that make coming out impossible. LGBT activists in these communities are silent in Sovereign Narratives. Kelly's understanding of LGBT rights today are narrowly framed, as were human rights in 1970s Argentina. Ask members of the Mapuche first nation about human rights, past and present. Ignored during the 1970s by human rights organizations for the manner in which the Mapuche people framed their rights battles as traditional struggles, like other Argentine first nations they remain mired in violent battles for land, water, and other rights. They receive no sustained substantive support from major human rights groups often dedicated in the first instance to putting octogenarian former military officers behind bars.

A stated transnational methodology that confines Latin America to Brazil, Chile, and Argentina brings into question the author's approach, especially in that the three national cases in question are more similar to one another than to the experiences of most other countries in the hemisphere...