Human rights narratives often address the concept of origins: Where do human rights come from? When did they emerge? And why? The answers to these questions, though, rely on precisely which manifestations of human rights are under investigation. Thinkers concerned with the ideational essence of human rights look back to ancient texts and trace a normative evolution through the Enlightenment and beyond. Scholars curious about international laws and multilateral organizations point to the creative years following World War II, and subsequent covenants and regional instruments. Indeed, philosophical, legalistic, and institutional perspectives have dominated the study of human rights since the field took shape as a matter for academic inquiry. More recently, however, theory, law, and organization have been complemented by robust examination of the social practice of human rights—the scholarly reflection on the role of nongovernmental organizations, advocacy campaigns, and social movements as primary sites of ideas and action. This trend continues in the two volumes under review as each in its own way contributes to a research program that examines the state of human rights practice in world politics.

Questions driving this work continue to focus on origins, emergence, and historical context: How did human rights discourse ascend as a mainstream expression of public consciousness and moral imagination? What do efforts toward transnational solidarity and activism capture about global social life? Why is human rights attractive as a mode of articulation for people in struggle? In order to respond to these profound questions, new stories must be uncovered to help us understand the nature and roots of contemporary transformations. For both collections, the crucial break occurs toward the end of the Cold War, in “the long 1970s.” As Jan Eckel posits in his conclusive chapter of The Breakthrough, “the 1970s saw a vigorous surge in the popularity of the idea and impressive proliferation of political practices associated with it” (p. 227). Disillusioned with grand ideological projects, yet faced with crippling state violence and political marginalization, human rights captured the determinations of grassroots movements in every pocket of the world. Latin America returns regularly (particularly as the subject of Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America) due to the widespread abuse by military dictatorships and as the locus of engagement by fledgling NGOs and coalitions. Amnesty International is also a frequently featured character, cutting its teeth and rising to prominence for its work in places like Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. As historians forage for kernels out of which popped the human rights community we would recognize today, turning points and landmark cases accumulate into a coherent chronicle.

The contributors to the Eckel and Moyn volume write closely in dialogue with the work of their coeditors. It is clear throughout the essays that Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia (2012), which many credit with reorienting the field of human rights history on the 1970s, has been influential to their thinking. A key strength of this volume lies in the geographical breadth of cases: Nigeria, Soviet Russia, East Germany, United States, Poland, Indonesia, and South Africa. Making connections from domestic politics to global affairs and back permits a unique look at the ways in which transnational forces operate. Furthermore—and both books do this well—remaining attuned to local circumstances and personal interventions provides a perspective so often elusive in human rights research. With the capacity to tell new tales, dominant narratives begin to appear more porous and less certain. This is particularly clear in Ned Richardson-Little’s chapter on East German dissidents’ engagement with socialist rights, Celia Donert’s essay on women’s rights discourse behind the Iron Curtain, and Simon Stevens’s work on popular activism against Apartheid. Closed societies wrestled with human rights, too. The victory over the white government in South Africa was not predetermined or linear. As we add texture and complexity to the stories we tell about history, we enrich our conception of norms and practices.

One nagging trope in many of the chapters is the repetitive referencing of three special episodes: the Helsinki Accords, the broad impact of Amnesty International, and the hearings in the Fraser Subcommittee on International Organizations. While there is little doubt as to their influence, they are alluded to so often that it feels as though they are doing disproportionate analytical work. These incidents explicitly bind the local to the global, and make the argument for the transnationality of the cases. Perhaps in the process of exposing new moments and weaving new narratives, in the future these can be taken as given and supplemented by additional instances of gravity to fill out the explanatory space.

Jessica Stites Mor does not rely on world-historic devices because her volume is grounded firmly in the construction of transnational solidarity in Latin America during the Cold War. The potency of this approach lies in the ability to assemble alternate accounts of struggles during this critical period. By globalizing domestic events and identifying transnational ties, Mor points to “new notions of political community” (p. 3) and “alternative political unities to the nation-state” p. (4). Most importantly and most uniquely, the form of solidarity throughout the volume is South–South rather than North–South, the more commonly discussed transnationalism often embodied by the efforts of major NGOs working in the developing world. Alliances described here build on shared visions of regional identity and common adversity: underdeveloped, formerly colonized nations assisting each other. This is especially poignant due to the ongoing reimagining of the global human rights movement as it adapts to shifting geopolitics. The Western-based movement, its organizations and philanthropic foundations, is only now acknowledging its own limitations and seeks to “de-center” (p. 6) its operations around the rise of new powers.

Many of the chapters in this volume record varieties of South–South support and provide a glimpse into what a non-northern human rights community could look like. This notion resonates most clearly in the writing of Margaret Power on external support for Puerto Rican nationalism, Sara Katherine Sanders’s work on the relationship between the Mexican student movement and others active in 1968, and Christine Hatzky’s essay on Cuba’s civil society engagement in Angola.

Emphasizing “a kind of alternative transnational solidarity from below—by and for the socially excluded and activist leaders within the Global South” (p. 5), the collection brilliantly illustrates a series of moments in recent Latin American history in which societies confronted violence and upheaval. Fascinating in each essay is the tension among discourses of anticolonialism, Marxism and leftist thought, Catholic social justice teaching, and democracy. While all of these categories offer distinct political advantages to movements in struggle, only very rarely do any of the chapters actually reference “human rights.” Despite the marquee status given in the volume’s title, human rights language is conspicuously absent once the reader ventures beyond the editor’s introduction. Rather than being in dialogue with the developments in the human rights realm during the period, Mor’s contributors propose visions of transnational solidarity that do not seem to rely on a rights-based approach in general, and only sparingly work with NGOs like Amnesty International. These cases also may present counterexamples to Eckel and Moyn’s thesis about the breakthrough of human rights in the 1970s.

Mor’s volume suggests that transnational struggles coalesced around various vernaculars based on the advantages they provided. Many utilized class- or faith-based rhetoric to galvanize public support, often combining discourses to suit their circumstances, while seemingly evading human rights talk. The absence of human rights also tells a story, though: South–South solidarity bears its own power, even (and especially?) as it departs from norms and practices with currency in the North. And this possibility—that human rights does not speak to the needs of social movements in the South—threatens the privileged position of northern NGOs whose power derives from their capacity to resonate with the grass roots. As Stephen Hopgood argues in The Endtimes of Human Rights (2014), there is nothing predestined about the sustainability of human rights as we know it, and in fact we may be already witnessing its demise. Rather than North–South transnational advocacy, it is curious to think about the influence of the South on future conceptions of human rights as this relationship evolves.

On the whole, both volumes generate impressive and powerful new research into transnational political activity from the 1970s on. Identifying the “breakthrough” for human rights in the period helps us understand the contours and dynamics of the contemporary movement. As Moyn remarks in his introduction, “It is almost as if the rise of human rights in the 1970s created an open portal through which many movements have later had to enter in order to gain acceptability and, sometimes, success, in their tangled relationships with external supporters and state power” (Breakthrough, p. 12). Particularly with ideological socialism, religious doctrine, and New Left identity politics falling out of favor as organizing principles, these volumes test the viability of the upstart moniker of human rights as a mobilizing force for emancipation and recognition. As well, however, the pressures inherent in integrating human rights discourse present themselves at times as alien and unfamiliar. Most urgently, from a social practice perspective, broadening our narratives about human rights permits renewed, critical investigation into the current state of advocacy efforts and allows history to inform persistent battles for human dignity.