Content area
Full text
Not a Movement of Dissidents: Amnesty International Beyond the Iron Curtain. By Christie Miedema. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019. Pp. 279. Paper $29.17. ISBN 978-3835334120.
This impressive transnational study offers a fresh examination of human rights activism in Eastern Europe in the 1970s. It reflects growing scholarly interest in human rights history, a topic vital for confronting our international system, which has become increasingly unmoored from human rights principles, multilateral agreements, and legal norms.
The study explodes two entrenched narratives simultaneously. The first states that the commitment to protect human rights in the Soviet state system was a hollow principle, and the second, more accepted interpretation, asserts that human rights advocates in the East (labeled dissidents) reflected the same values and principles as their transnational Western supporters and counterparts in deploying the languages of human rights. Together, this narrative argues, human rights activists bridged the gaps between East and West in the Cold War. It is a triumphalist gloss.
Miedema's study charts a much more fraught and complicated history. It centers on two poles of analysis: the influential Western human rights organization Amnesty International, founded in 1961, and oppositional groups, most notably in Poland but also, for comparative purposes, the Soviet Union. This volume's focus on highlighting the 1970s permits Miedema to carefully engage the relevant sources—archival and published primary documents, oral histories, and state secret service...