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Taking on the World's Repressive Regimes: The Ford Foundation's International Human Rights Policies and Practices, William Korey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 336 pp., $75 cloth.
With Taking on the World's Repressive Regimes, William Korey has done a great service for both those who champion and follow the realization of human rights internationally and those who wish to understand the potential and limitations of foundation strategies to bring about real change. And "real change" is certainly what characterizes the narrative of this slim volume, which covers the significant realization of human rights from about 1967 to the present day.
Despite the UN's adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - which should have given some saliency to human rights as an urgent issue for governments, intergovernmental agencies, and nonprofits - that ideal was not instantly achieved. Even twenty years later, in the 1960s, "international human rights" as a subject of general concern and conversation remained all but invisible in U.S. public and political discourse. Over the course of the subsequent forty years, however, its topicality, and indeed urgency, steadily increased, as demonstrated by a succession of great efforts to overcome repression in virtually all parts of the globe. Today, human rights violations are the grist of daily news, triggered by China's actions in Tibet, the continuing calamity in Darfur, and the reluctance of the Myanmar dictators to accept international assistance in the wake of the May 2008 cyclone, to name but a few of the most...