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 interviews. Through this deep reading, she pays much-needed attention to the precise meanings of words in the languages of the day as well as to how they have been deployed subsequently by historians. Miedema demonstrates that human rights groups and activities supported by Amnesty International were “heavily influenced by the ideological and political context in which [they] emerged and that this relationship, although sometimes beneficial, was usually problematic” (14).

Amnesty International, in Miedema's compelling interpretation, modeled itself on one of the first global NGOs, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Geneva-based group overseeing state compliance with the Geneva Conventions codified first in 1864. This pioneering example of treaty law demanded impartial and neutral medical care for wounded soldiers on the battlefield, offering aid to “friend and foe” alike. Although I quibble with some of Miedema's interpretations of the historical details of the emergence of the ICRC (a debate for specialists in international law, perhaps), the analogy works. Amnesty International adopted a mandate that enjoined its members to be impartial, balanced, and detached—a tall and largely unobtainable order for an organization that also needed to “name and shame” state violations of human rights openly and publicly. This tension came to a head in the politics of alleged dissidents in Eastern Europe.

Miedema explores the burgeoning of local, homegrown human rights activism, particularly as it was reshaped by the Helsinki Accords (1975), penning in rich detail patterns of development in Poland compared to the Soviet Union. She explores, among other themes, the strategies for “alternative public spaces” sponsored by the KOR (Workers’ Defense Committee), those of the more nationalist group, the Defense of Human and Civil Rights (RDPCiO), and, in the 1980s, the actions of Solidarity, the independent trade union movement. In Poland, she writes, “Developments were more broadly carried by society—involving mass worker uprisings and occasional nationalist overtones” (109). These diverse initiatives drew the leadership of Amnesty International to Eastern Europe as a vital arena for its designs on global influence.

What does the comparative and transnational lens show about the crossing of borders and the ideological divides in the Cold War? This is the study's larger question, which Miedema examines in the main by exploring the many motives behind affiliation and membership in this NGO—both East and West. But generalization is difficult, Miedema notes, because the motives varied over time and from place to place. Nonetheless, she draws together a number of patterns and arguments. Notably, the study reminds us that a shared language—whether taking dissidence or human rights as norm—needs historical specificity and close examination of values to capture its operative and protean meanings. Miedema argues that the dissident became an object of “projection” for those in the West spanning the full political spectrum from left to liberal to conservative. Indeed, each group on this scale could claim the activists and their movement for its own political purposes and causes (10, 18). This seems a hard lesson to learn, however, as examples from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Aung San Suu Kyi tragically show.

Additionally, from Moscow to Warsaw, the recruits rarely extended their activism outside their own borders and, despite their best intentions, Amnesty International leaders could not attract followers beyond oppositional circles. In short, Amnesty International in the East was enlisted for domestic opposition. Furthermore, its directors clung to the original mandate—because the organization strove to be apolitical, the leadership ended up being “indecisive” in dealing with member applications or confronting East European governments. Overall, Miedema judges, the organization's guidelines worked to prevent members from becoming “more political” (225). East European membership, thus, had a limited impact on Amnesty International's overall goals and policies.

In the final analysis, and bringing the argument full circle, Miedema concludes that the organization functioned more as a humanitarian group saving victims of persecution than a human rights community working to uncover and root out abuses and injustices by transforming society. It is an intriguing thesis that should find considerable interest among human rights students, scholars, and lay readers far beyond the geographical and temporal boundaries of this study.