Keepers of the Flame

The first in-depth look at working life inside a major human rights organization.

Stephen Hopgood is Professor of International Relations, SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International, also from Cornell, and American Foreign Environmental Policy and the Power of the State.

Hopgood's unique study of Amnesty International is a welcome contribution from a political scientist with anthropological instincts, and it is likely to become a classic in the field. Hopgood immersed himself for over a year in Amnesty's culture, rituals, and politics, and then interpreted this data with insights from Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu. He writes clearly and well, and his interpretations should appeal to students of transnational organizing, human rights, and international affairs, broadly conceived.... For students of international organizations, one of the book's most intriguing elements is the author's representation of the Amnesty employee experience.... As Hopgood's book makes abundantly clear, it is devilishly difficult to build a representative, transnational movement for justice, even with the best of intentions.

Hopgood spent a year in Amnesty's International London headquarters, the International Secretariat, interviewing staff and researching the inevitable bureaucratic and philosophical challenges facing the well-known humanitarian organization. This is an interesting, ambitious, and lucid critique of the International Secretariat.

Hopgood has done the organization, the global human rights movement, and other stakeholders and important service by getting inside Amnesty and revealing its internal culture. For movement insiders, Hopgood's book provides... insight into what holds the movement together as well as what tends to divide it. For outsiders, his book offers a penetrating portrait of an improbably but indispensable organization.

Margaret Keck, The Johns Hopkins University:

This is a remarkable book. A fascinating and sensitive account of Amnesty International's organizational development, it is also a penetrating reflection on the practice and practices of moral and political authority, of the 'commodification of moral concern under globalization,' and of the possibility of universal values. How can AI govern itself, and on what basis does it make choices about its campaigns? How distant is the initial focus on Prisoners of Conscience from the statement that Guantanamo would be the gulag of our time? Throughout the narrative, Stephen Hopgood never lets the reader off the hook, presenting to us the strongest possible arguments for all sides of impossible choices so that by the book's end we are with him in trying to think through our own morality in the face of the quandaries he has opened up for us.

Michael Barnett, author of Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism:

Stephen Hopgood emerged from a year doing field research at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International with an incredibly insightful, complex, and fascinating interpretation of the organization. There are points of pure brilliance and sparkling insights, especially when he discusses how the tensions between the sacred and profane, moral and political authority, play themselves out in a changing environment.