Snyder, Sarah B.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Sarah B. Snyder “identifies transnational connections and social movements during the ‘long 1960s’ as the foundation for human rights activism,” delving into cases of the United States responding to human rights questions abroad through assertive foreign policy. She utilizes five main case studies: “[H]ow Americans responded to human rights violations in the Soviet Union, in Southern Rhodesia after the 1965 unilateral declaration of independence, in Greece after the 1967 coup, in authoritarian South Korea, and in Chile after the 1973 coup.” (1) She also shows that U.S. domestic and foreign policies became increasingly interconnected in this period, for instance with domestic social issues driving human rights efforts abroad. She emphasizes that human rights policy support built cumulatively over time. The most extensive and numerous American foreign policy responses to human rights abuses came in the Soviet Union. NGOs, members of Congress, and private citizens came together in networks of activism that spurred international action. In Rhodesia, African American activists directly related the freedom struggle of African peoples to their own civil rights work in the United States. She shows that in the 1960s and early 1970s overall, Americans increasingly made clear an unwillingness to tolerate U.S. government support for regimes that violated human rights.