Making Human Rights Effective? Amnesty International, “Aid and Trade,” and the Shaping of Professional Human Rights Activism, 1961–1983

This article takes Amnesty International’s “Aid and Trade” debate during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a window onto the ways that human rights activists thought about their work and how they understood their organization. It examines the way they grappled with their relationship in to expanding governmental action on human rights, and the meaning of the concepts “effectiveness” and “impartiality,” which were central to Amnesty’s founding.