This chapter shows how, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the WCC sought to spread the liberationist form of human rights activism developed in response to authoritarianism in Latin America to other world regions. In Asia and Africa, the ecumenical movement sought to apply lessons derived from the Latin American context while at the same time developing approaches suited to the particular contexts at play. South Korea’s minjung theology, which played a prominent role in resistance to the country’s military dictatorship as well as its deep economic inequality, was a widely influential example of Asian liberation theology that mixed with human rights advocacy. In sub-Saharan Africa, the All-Africa Conference of Churches encouraged churches to resist their political leaders’ efforts to deflect criticism of their own human rights records, though the struggle against apartheid and skepticism of human rights as essentially Western hampered such efforts. For Christians in Western Europe and North America, meanwhile, taking up a liberationist human rights agenda meant applying a critical lens to Western societies, but especially finding ways to act in solidarity with the Third World.

It was Latin America that provided the main impetus behind the WCC’s articulation of liberationist human rights. Through its Human Rights Resources Office for Latin America, the WCC helped to facilitate activism across the region and galvanized support in the West. In Chile, after the 1973 coup by Pinochet, and in other countries under military dictatorship, the WCC collaborated with the Catholic Church to both remedy immediate suffering and resist repression. It also facilitated regional ecumenism and the dissemination of liberation theology. Contrary to contemporary critics and later accounts that suggest there were only two ways to respond to the rise of military rule, namely pursuing armed “revolution” or “minimalist” liberal rights activism, the chapter shows that some Protestants and Catholics sought to establish a space between these alternatives. The WCC helped to keep the flame of liberationist human rights activism going, supporting both local forms of “conscientization” (a term coined by the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, who spent the 1970s in exile as an associate of the WCC) and generating pressure via its member churches in the West.

The need to challenge the political-economic “root causes” of human rights violations led the WCC to campaign for international economic restructuring. This chapter first shows how the WCC articulated its new human rights agenda, at the 1974 St. Pölten consultation on “Human Rights and Christian Responsibility” and its 1975 Nairobi Assembly. These conferences coincided with the international campaign for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) at the United Nations, led by the Non-Aligned Movement. Seeing in the NIEO a generational opportunity to change international inequality, the WCC supported its thrust, while seeking to act as a corrective to the NIEO’s lack of concern for individual rights. The NIEO’s state-centric nature contributed to its demise by the end of the decade, however, and while the WCC continued to pursue international redistribution over the course of the 1980s, the Third World sovereign debt crisis, the end of the Cold War, and the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights further set back its hopes for a more egalitarian world order.

This introduction to Part II explains why the WCC shifted toward a “liberationist” human rights agenda in the late 1960s and 1970s. One key factor was Cold War détente, which opened up space for criticism of the Cold War deadlock and the superpower interventionism it supposedly justified. Another was decolonization, which contributed to a global reconfiguration of Christianity. These enabled the rise of the New Left, which favored grassroots activism over bureaucratic structures and projected hopes for political renewal onto the Third World. While often overlooked because of the simultaneous process of secularization, especially in Western Europe, religion played an important role in the ferment of the 1960s. Liberation theology, emanating above all from Latin America, inspired much of the WCC’s new agenda, which was defined by its overtly political positioning against liberalism and alignment with socialism and especially anti-imperialism. The WCC’s course contrasted with the liberal rights agenda of Amnesty, the statist agenda espoused by postcolonial leaders promoting a New International Economic Order, and the anticommunism of more conservative actors, like US evangelicals.

Through its Programme to Combat Racism (PCR), the WCC supported Southern African liberation movements. The PCR constituted a remarkable act of solidarity with those engaged in the struggle against apartheid, garnering the WCC heightened credibility in the Third World. But the PCR’s solidarity with the armed struggle waged by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1970s led it to downplay human rights, a concept it – like the ANC – associated with liberal humanitarianism. This stance effectively subordinated individual rights to the cause of liberation, leading the WCC to turn a blind eye to the internal repression practiced by liberation movements. Having been a feature of the ANC’s agenda in the 1950s, human rights only returned to prominence in the 1980s, as the end of apartheid came into sight. Meanwhile, however, it was South Africa’s black ecumenical leaders, especially Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak, who worked to reconcile human rights and liberation. Their prominent role in South Africa’s domestic anti-apartheid movement ultimately facilitated the integration of a capacious conception of human rights into South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution.

Chapter 4 explores how diplomacy was practiced during the Cold War, focusing on how the period reshaped diplomacy and international law. The chapter challenges the view of the Cold War as merely a diplomatic struggle, suggesting instead that it was a struggle over the nature of diplomacy itself. It examines three key struggles: the relationship between openness and secrecy, diplomacy as performance and the concept of neutrality. The Cold War saw a return to secret diplomacy – public diplomacy was intertwined with intelligence and covert operations. In contrast, anti-colonial diplomacy emphasised openness and solidarity, using international institutions as platforms for lawful encounters. The chapter also discusses the contest over neutrality, with European international law protecting neutrality, while the Amero-Soviets disparaged it. The Non-Aligned Movement embraced active neutralism, rejecting Cold War bipolarity. The chapter highlights the diplomatic style of the Third World, which sought to assert a different international law and world order. It critiques the Western response, characterised by anti-diplomacy, relegation, and interventionism. The chapter concludes by emphasising the importance of recognising the plurality of diplomatic practices and international laws during the Cold War, and the ongoing struggle to reconfigure global politics and law after empire.

Chapter 5 provides an overview of the development of the International Council on Archives and its role mediating custodial disputes over colonial archives. This chapter, admittedly, interrupts the book’s narrative. Chronologically, it covers the late 1940s through the 1970s and largely examines the council’s main conferences during the period in order to trace the emergence of the notion of the “migrated archives” and debates over their custody. Like the role of international organizations themselves, this chapter is significant but somewhat detached from the realm of everyday activity surrounding Kenya’s “migrated archives.” However, as is demonstrated by the chapter, it provided important resources with which former colonies advocated the return of political documents as a matter of postcolonial sovereignty. These advocacy efforts were stalled by the reconfiguration of imperial hegemony upon which the International Council on Archives was based.

The introduction posits the relevance of the history of fair trade activism to the history of postcolonial globalization to highlight three striking transformations: decolonization, the rise of consumer society, and the emergence of the internet. It underlines the importance of studying ‘moderate’ movements as part of a social history of globalization. It goes on to relate the history of fair trade to earlier historiography, demonstrating how the history of third-world movements, consumer activism, and humanitarianism can be combined to better understand the history of this movement. It finally introduces the structure of the book, which takes its cue from the materiality, which was crucial to the development of the fair trade movement by centring five products: handicrafts, sugar, paper, coffee, and textiles.

The ‘Cane Sugar Campaign’, launched in 1968, introduced a distinctly political perspective in campaigns for fair trade, exposing the unequal structures of global trade around the disparities in the global sugar trade. The campaign was ignited by the stalling negotiations of the United Nations Conferences on Trade and Development in 1964 and 1968. It thus directly responded to the impact of decolonization in international politics. Through transferring these issues to local activism, it related such international development to the everyday lives of people in Western Europe. The chapter charts the emergence of attempts to address global inequality through interventions in national, European, and international politics. It then shows how European integration in particular prompted activists to set up transnational campaigns, but also severely hampered attempts at campaigning because of the difficulty of transnational communication as well as a lack of experience in addressing transnational institutions.

Far from representing the abandonment of civilian government by conservative, pro-military forces in Washington, DC, Bolivia’s 1964 coup d’état occurred over strident objections from the United States. In describing this surprising story of local Cold War golpismo (coup waging) in Latin America, this chapter analyzes the overlapping trajectory of three key groups of actors: the deterioration of the ancien régime of middle-class nationalists (los golpeados), the widespread involvement of liberal developmentalist US officials (los gringos), and the multivalent ideologies and strategies of civilian and military plotters (los golpistas) who brought down twentieth-century Bolivia’s most powerful leader. The case study reveals a superpower’s inability to micromanage political development on the periphery, and it highlights the underappreciated intimacy between civil society and military officers in the social phenomenon known as Latin American golpismo.

The three empirical chapters correlate to the three phases spread over the Nehru years where India first started out by adopting a highly critical stance towards world politics. This constructive phase reached its high point in the Bandung Conference of 1955. This position fell into flux in the latter half of 1956; by this point, the ambiguities once nurtured in order to help define India’s positions on political issues were now used to justify them in a political language. By the early 1960s, non-alignment went into its third phase where it was used to mandate the use of force for the purposes of peacekeeping. The Epilogue considers this movement as discussed in the three phases and offers some final remarks.

This chapter situates the communist victory in the Second Indochina War in the broader context of Third World revolution during the 1970s. It argues that 1975 represented a high-water mark of secular revolutionary activity in the global Cold War, and that the following years witnessed the retreat of left-wing revolutionary politics in the Global South. The period that followed saw the rise of a new model of political organization among Third World revolutionaries that largely abandoned secular progressive ideologies in favor of appeals to ethnic and sectarian identities as the basis of armed revolution. If Vietnamese communist fighters represented the archetype of Third World Revolutionaries in the long 1960s, the Afghan Mujahideen would come to symbolize the revolutionaries of the 1980s.

Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on the Global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Opposition to the war helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions, but the political movements that emerged resonated differently through various parts of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Second, resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David versus Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the agency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in consciously cultivating these antiwar internationalist affiliates.