"Nowhere did two understandings of U.S. identity—human rights and anticommunism—come more in conflict with each other than they did in Latin America. To refocus U.S. policy on human rights and democracy required a rethinking of U.S. policy as a whole. It required policy makers to choose between policies designed to defeat communism at any cost and those that remain within the bounds of the rule of law."—from the Introduction
Kathryn Sikkink believes that the adoption of human rights policy represents a positive change in the relationship between the United States and Latin America. In Mixed Signals she traces a gradual but remarkable shift in U.S. foreign policy over the last generation. By the 1970s, an unthinking anticommunist stance had tarnished the reputation of the U.S. government throughout Latin America, associating Washington with tyrannical and often brutally murderous regimes. Sikkink recounts the reemergence of human rights as a substantive concern, showing how external pressures from activist groups and the institution of a human rights bureau inside the State Department have combined to remake Washington's agenda, and its image, in Latin America. The current war against terrorism, Sikkink warns, could repeat the mistakes of the past unless we insist that the struggle against terrorism be conducted with respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Kathryn Sikkink is the Arleen C. Carlson Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina and coauthor with Margaret E. Keck of Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, also from Cornell, winner of the 1999 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
Table of Contents
Foreword
ix
Preface
xiii
Acknowledgments
xxi
Part I
The Origins of Human Rights Policies
1
Introduction to the Origins of Human Rights Policies
3
2
The Idea of Internationally Recognized Human Rights
23
3
The Reemergence of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1970s
48
Part II
Effectiveness of Human Rights Policies
4
Introduction to the Effectiveness of Human Rights Policies
79
5
U.S. Human Rights Policy during the Nixon and Ford Administrations
106
6
The Carter Administration and Human Rights Policy toward Latin America
121
7
The Reagan Administration and Human Rights Policy toward Latin America
148
8
Institutionalizing Human Rights Policy toward Latin America during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton Years
Mixed Signals is a very good account of the development of U.S. human rights policy, with a special focus on Latin America. Kathryn Sikkink argues that the centrality of human rights in the United States represents an 'identity shift' in the national conception of its interests in the world. She does an excellent job of showing how the creation within the government of a bureaucratic apparatus focused on human rights played a key role in this identity shift.
Harold Hongju Koh
Kathryn Sikkink speaks with equal authority in the scholarly world of international relations theory and in the bare-knuckles domain of human rights enforcement. She delivers an insightful analysis and telling indictment of U.S. human rights policy toward Latin America but ends with a message of hope: that human rights can be protected, if governments take rights seriously and if individuals with ideas persevere.
Lars Schoultz
The central questions will always be simple: how to elevate the role of human rights in foreign policy and then how to play that role successfully. The answers, alas, will always be complex, but for our generation they are to be found in Kathryn Sikkink's Mixed Signals. A genuine intellectual triumph, impressive in both empirical scope and analytic subtlety, Mixed Signals is a richly nuanced, meticulously crafted chronicle of the effort to incorporate human rights into U.S. policy toward Latin America during the final four decades of the twentieth century. A distinguished political scientist who led an earlier life as a Washington human rights activist, Sikkink writes with the authority of someone who was present at the creation and then adds the conceptual clarity that we have come to associate with her name. The result—Mixed Signals—is the book I will hand to my best students.
