Principles in Power

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them.

By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power.

This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

Vanessa Walker is the Morgan Assistant Professor of Diplomatic History at Amherst College.

Principles in Power is an authorative account of the human rights actions towards Chile and Argentina.

While this topic has received much attention, the focus here on the relationship between policy makers in the executive and congressional branches of US government and nongovernmental advocates in the US, Argentina, and Chile is original. Adding to the book's impact is its tight organization and fluid writing style.

Principles in Power is an expertly researched and nuanced account [which] portrays the 1970s not as a high-water mark for human rights in foreign policy but instead as the origin story for the often-fraught social movement-insider dynamic between activists and policymakers that persists today.

Barbara J. Keys, Durham University, author of Reclaiming American Virtue:

Vanessa Walker carefully unravels the complex interactions among activists, Congress, and the executive branch to show how human rights policy was made under three very different presidencies. An important book that helps us understand the strengths and limits of efforts to create a moral foreign policy.

William Schmidli, Leiden University, author of The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere:

Principles in Power advances our understanding of human rights and US foreign relations in the late Cold War. Weaving together a broad cast of characters, including policymakers, diplomats, and transnational advocates, Vanessa Walker's insight illuminates the struggle between efforts to reform Cold War policies at home and improve human rights conditions abroad.