This fall if you look back, but i was particularly delighted to thismark here as part of fall series. We go way back to the early days of my time here at the Wilson Center running the colton history project. Mark has moved on to bigger and Better Things and he will be talking about this today. Hes the professor of history at the university of chicago along reimagined american human rights in the 20th century , the book he will be talking about today. His books include familiar made strange american icons and ,rtifacts published last year vietnam and war, 2009, and the making of postcolonial vietnam published in 2000. President ofast the American Society of foreign relations. With that, mark, it is great to have you here. Mr. Bradley it is nice to see very familiar faces. It has been a very long time, and its nice to see you. Eric, i was your ta a really, really long time ago. He was a great professor. Its also a real pleasure to see warren colin, who in many ways i feel like gave me the kind of intellectual courage to be who i am, so thanks for being here, warren. I want to take people to the 20th of january, 1977, just a frome bit down the mall here. When jimmy carter announced in , peopleural address are more politically career and now craving and demanding their place in the sun, not just for the benefit of their own condition but for basic human rights. In the wake of carters inaugural address, human rights became front and enter in Popular Culture in the United States with as many as mayof americans saying in a 1977 poll that they had read or heard a great deal or fair amount about human rights. Most american historians have followed the selfperceptions of jimmy carter and his contemporaries, arguing that carters inaugural address and pioneering is not always successful human rights diplomacy propelled human rights to unprecedented heights of prestige and power. In their view, carters embrace of human rights and its broader popular resonance in the 1970s had their source in a purely domestic context and then gradually cascaded out into the world. The causal motor in these americanbased accounts are the crisis of confidence in the wake of watergate and the vietnam war and a revolves in they say, at andrealpolitik of nixon foreign policy. American assumptions about their own primacy in shaping the Global Human Rights order ran just as deep in the 1970s themselves. As one carter political operative put it in the moment, the United States is the one nation where human rights is center stage for the world. Global, there was a explosion of interest in human rights in the 1970s, but thereans did not get first. Indeed, one might argue that they got there last. Today to talk to you about the 1970s to offer a slice of the larger approach i take to americans and human rights in my book the world reimagined. The world is centrally concerned with how and why human rights went from an exotic aspirational linkage in the mid20th century to a kind of everyday vernacular today. It does so by exploring the entanglements of the United States in the rise of what i call the Global Human Rights imagination. In part, i argue what human rights were understood to be by the historical actors that gave them shape and form, weather in isout of the United States, a considerably messier and more complex process than the linear narrative of the new human rights history would allow, among others the seminole count of human rights politics in utopia the seminal account of human rights politics in utopia. Is anr what i hope alternative narrative about the place of the United States in 20thcentury human rights history, and i hope to make a modest contribution to a new way of writing Global Human Rights history itself. I am not so much concerned with the state or with great power politics or with the diplomatic negotiations through which the International Human rights legal regime came to be formed, the subject of much of the new human rights history. The central protagonists of my book are what we would now call nonstate actors, although they often did not identify themselves in that way in the historical moment. Diplomats and policymakers are , but theely absent emphasis is on what we might in retrospect human rights amateurs who collectively brought into being a distinctly 20thcentury human rights imagination. Rights dentistslot of involved in Global Human Rights politics. Activists, students, and senior citizens. They were the race of the growing Human Rights Movement growing humane Rights Movement. Quite simply, it was these amateurs that made it believable to a variety of the american public, and critically, they did so on a transnational campus. Globals in which transformation fundamentally transition how human rights were experienced is at the center of my work, how it dealt to have rights or to lose them were critical to the growing believability of the growing itsn rights imagination in growing american vernacular. So, too, were apprehending how the suffering of strangers have come to matter as much as ones own. The making of human rights history, my analysis marks a departure from the more common practice of writing both international and human rights history. Historians seemingly more easily articulate the kind of imagine physicality of geopolitics than feeling,tructures of and yet, the historical presence is often understood effectively before it is perceived in other ways. Recent work in literary theory helps us see what has been largely invisible to historians. , itpresent is not an object is a thing that is sensed and under constant revision. A genre under of social time and practice in which a relation of persons or worlds is sensed but the rules of habitation and genre of storytelling about it are ends able. Human rights and its believability emerged in just such volatile and unstable moments. That these american sensibilities had global roots is also critical to the argument that i have found. To focus on the place of the United States in the making of the Global Human Rights imaginary might initially strike you as a kind of return to the exception list narrative that too often has informed the writing of American History. In fact, my aim is quite the opposite. Seeking to provincial eyes how provincialize how america operated on the world stage by lifting up the policies initially set up in motion far beyond americas shores. In doing so, i hope to situate American History both smaller and larger the nation. It can be difficult for some u. S. Historians to acknowledge the extent to which american engagement with human rights in the 1970s was the story of the importation of ideas into the United States. Into a american domestic space rather than the exportation of American Values out into the wider world. If americans had been fully present at the creation of a Global Human Rights order in the 1940s and they were, i think, and that is part one of my book, and human rights have banished from discourse by the end of 1970s. By the end of the 1970s, human rights was everywhere on the american scene. So, how come that is the case . Critically when human rights , moved from the margins of Global Political discourse, it becomes a central optic through which a variety of people saw the world around them. It did so almost everywhere before human race came to human rights came to the United States. Not only was Amnesty International a leading global rights Nongovernmental Organization in the 1970s, the contours of human rights thought and practiced in the United States were deeply shaped ofa Diverse Network local actors in the soviet union, asia, and latin america. So did western european leaders and activists in the reaction to political oppression in greece in the 1960s and various preparatory meetings that led to the helsinki accords. In all this, i think it is fair to argue that american actors were initially big players. Bit players. Ofan rights is best thought in 1970s america as a kind of guest language. One that would return to the cultural politics of the United States through what americans came to know about the thought of dissidents in the soviet union and other such transfer transnational rights rights advocates as Amnesty International. It is about broader, global transformations. Once setting the language of Global Human Rights in motion, it needs attention. Before we can even begin to appreciate the american return to human rights in the late simply in terms of number, there 1970s. Is no question that the decade of the 1970s was a ngosnational human rights moment. Amnesty International Reported only 32,000 members worldwide 1973. By 1980, the organization counted hundreds of thousands of members in 134 counties and a Nobel Peace Prize amongst its accomplishments all in a single decade. Beyond Amnesty International, the number of organizations working on human rights increased exponentially over the course of the 1970s. This surge of transnational nonstate human rights politics was part of an even larger mobile explosion in social mobilization around a variety of fields. Human Rights Advocacy emerged simultaneously with new concerns about the environment, humanitarianism and global feminism. The presence of transnational human rights politics and the broader language of social mobilization simultaneously reflected but also contributed to a profound shift in world order in the 1970s. On one level the statebased political structures that have formed the International Cold ii order after world war began to come undone, but just as importantly, the bonds between individuals in the world individuals, states, and the World Community started to reshape the types of political claims that were made in the International Sphere. This was boosted by the growing presence of more witness to suffering and injustice. These transformations in the world structures deeply shaped the transnational politics of human rights then and now in the United States and elsewhere in the world. I want to move relatively quickly through the structural dimensions of these transformations. They are likely to seem more familiar today too many of you. To say briefly about structure, the 1970s were a Tipping Point between the post world war ii world and the world we live in today. With a set of structural changes pushing up against the nation statebased International Order that had organized World Politics since the end of world war ii. Again, in what is now an increasingly familiar story the , rise of Global Finance capitalism began to up and at the end upend prevailing statehood economic planning. Begin to shape political life after 1945. And howard markets at the expense of government, 1970s globalization allowed nationstates to manage their own economies. In holds the deconstruction of the post war welfare states in its various iterations, whether it be in the United States or western europe or japan. To use a phrase coined by some political scientists in the 1970s, between a variety of state and nonstate actors, rather than cold war style superpower politics increasingly shaped the contours of the international system. The state, of course, did not disappear in this New Territory lies era of globalization, as it did to reinvent itself. It became a more disaggregated state. They began to form Cross National horizontal linkages as well as vertical linkages around common concerns, trade, finance, environment, or sometimes with human rights. The end of empire was another crucial structural shift in the 1970s. By the mid1970s, almost all of the colonized world had become independent, territorially based nationstates. With the end of empire, the migratory patterns that had characterized the first decade after 1945, these migratory patterns focusing largely around europe began to give way to flows of people from asia and africa. The colonizing wars of independence and heightened ethnic conflict accounted for much of this movement. Significantly, many of the primary subjects of the new Global Politics of human rights in the late 20th century emerged out of these conflicts. Along with new global flows of capital and people, technological changes and their diffusion also helped make possible and accelerate new linkages that informed globalization and certainly, politics. An rights the first Communication Satellite was launched in the 1960s. Television increased worldwide in significant ways increase the circulation of images in massive ways. Jet travel was made cheaper and cheaper to make air travel from one place to another less expensive than ever before. Fax machines and overnight mail was made possible. I told my students how exciting it was that you could move , and theyrey fax not particularly excited about it. Yes, the computer moves with great speed, and, yes, so the social media, but the growing reach in the 1970s did rest on in that moment what was an increasingly sophisticated use of forms that allow information and people to flow in ways they had not before. Back up just a bit and to say, to argue that the processes of globalization in the 1970s began to transform post1945ures of the International Order is not to suggest that globalization is without a history itself or the dramaticof these changes were also not present in the past. We also increasingly know more about the presence of globalization in the 19th , but what i want to say is to stress too much historical continuity of the world of the 1970s and beyond. Again, the intensity and philosophy of Global Networks i thek did begin to remake nationstate and more importantly, unbundle relationships between sovereignty and state power. So if these structural transformations in a sense provided an undergirding for , the new mobilizations main part of the argument has to do with assets rather than structure. I argue that a new global sensibility about power came of both power and territoriality came about to entirely reshape the kinds of political claims made by nonstate actors in the 1970s and i think beyond. In this new global affect of the 1970s, leaf in the authenticity authenticity of the interior world of individual suffering rather than the external structures that might have produced the suffering in the first place was central to the kind of clinical claims that were being made by activists including human rights activists. Individual consciousness, lived experience, moral witness, in a testimonial turn became key words in this era. It began to reshape the contours of Global Politics and morality. The rise of an emergent holocaust consciousness and its insistence on the power of individual witness and testimony, i think, was critical to the rise of this new structure and feeling in the 1970s. It was the trial of enough inhmann Adolf Eichmann israel in 1962 in which the global testimonial turn seemed to first emerge. Livingn with the ss under a false identity and argentina had been captured two years earlier and brought to israel to stand trial for his role in organizing the mass deportation of European Jews into nazi extermination camps in such as auschwitz during world war ii. Coverage of this trial not only put the holocaust on the front page of world newspapers, but the decision by the Israeli Government to call so many survivors as witnesses was unprecedented. In the nurnberg trials, in the 1940s, perpetrators and written documentation had been the focal point. Victims left to the side. Now, the victims and lived experience were at the center of the trial. One might say that the testimony of the first witness not only represent a rupture in the trial but also in broader, popular understandings of the holocaust. She opted to speak in you dish yiddish rather than hebrew. As she gave her testimony. On hearing the language of the slaughtered and the burned. The project became in part the memory of survival and often graphic murder of European Jews by the nazi regime and survivor testimony resonated far beyond the israeli courtroom. It brought into being a heightened holocaust consciousness in the 1970s, and it also directly and profoundly informed the testimonial practices through which advocates of humanitarianism, environmental protection, and human rights in the 1970s begin began to remake the form and content of transnational political and moral intervention. Central to their efforts was the insistence on forms of public witness and concerns for the psyche, therapeutic, emotions, as important as statistical measures in making various truth claims. More witness begin to shape the new global affect of the 1970s. Amnesty internationals foundational practice was to bear witness to the suffering of