Journal of Human Rights

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Flat affect? Revisiting emotion in the

historiography of human rights

Roland Burke

To cite this article: Roland Burke (2017) Flat affect? Revisiting emotion in the historiography of
human rights, Journal of Human Rights, 16:2, 123-141, DOI: 10.1080/14754835.2015.1103168

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JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS
2017, VOL. 16, NO. 2, 123–141
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2015.1103168

Flat affect? Revisiting emotion in the historiography of human

rights
Roland Burke
La Trobe University

ABSTRACT
Across the preceding 15 years, the study of the post-1945 human rights
project has emerged as one of most rapidly developing fields of
transnational and international history. This article surveys the current
state of the art of emotionalist historiography in the sphere of human
rights and humanitarianism. It identifies the value of histories of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social movements, which have
successfully begun to incorporate emotion into their analyses. The
historiography of the deeper humanitarian past may well serve as the
road to more nuanced histories of contemporary human rights
struggles and means for integrating grand-scale political and
intellectual history with the interior sentiment of individuals. Through
a brief survey of emotion at various moments of the postwar rights
story, the article argues that the study of shifting sentiment can
substantially enrich accounts of human rights history, as it already has
done in other fields.

In recent years, the history of human rights has emerged as amongst the most vibrant fields
of inquiry. With an initial wave of scholarship in the late 1990s, led by Paul Gordon Lauren
(1998), William Korey (1998), Johannes Morsink (1999), and Mary Ann Glendon (2001),
historians have begun to recover the origins, evolution, and impact of human rights ideas.
More recently, the first set of narrative works, which were characterized by a mildly celebra-
tory inflection, have been joined by “new histories” of human rights, which have tended
toward markedly greater skepticism, and a finer grained parsing of what, precisely, consti-
tuted the modern notion of human rights. The “new” historians, exemplified by Reza Afshari
(2007), Samuel Moyn (2010), and Jan Eckel (2013), have revivified human rights as a con-
tested and contentious concept with complex origins and uncertain implications. Most pro-
vocatively, these “new histories” have challenged the presumption that the concept of
human rights that flourished in the 1970s held continuous and common ancestry with the
philosophical milieu of preceding centuries. Often richly informed by newly retrieved and
voluminous archival material, the historiography of human rights is now amongst the most
dynamic in the history of ideas (Hoffmann 2010; Whelan 2011; Klose and Geyer 2013;
Snyder 2013).

CONTACT Roland Burke r.burke@latrobe.edu.au History Program, Languages, Histories, and Cultures, Faculty of
Humanities, La Trobe University, David Myers East 130, Bundoora, Vic 3086, Australia.
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
124 R. BURKE

Despite the efflorescence of enthusiasm for investigating the history of rights, the human-
ity of human rights has only begun to find some place in the discussion (Tate 2007; Keys
2014). While historians of rights, both old and new, have made oblique reference to the sen-
timents that generated emancipatory and humanitarian social movements, they have tended
to look more closely at grander scale geopolitical shifts. Moyn’s path-breaking work is neces-
sarily parsimonious on the humans that made the human rights “breakthrough” of the 1970s
and instead maps the ideological context most proximate to the precipitous rise of mass
human rights activism. Many of the older generation of works, with the notable exception of
Lyn Hunt (2007a), are similarly modest in their investigation of sentiments and emotional
engines for mobilization. Lauren’s magisterial narrative, which traverses millennia, has as its
principal focus the constellation of ideals that coalesced into modern human rights con-
sciousness, and the manner by which these preceding sets of thought and diverse philoso-
phies became “human rights.”
This article surveys the current state of the art of emotionalist historiography in the
broad sphere of human rights and humanitarianism. In so doing, it identifies a level of
scholarly quiescence within the rapidly expanding array of contemporary human rights
histories, particularly those focused on the postwar era. A historical subject that inher-
ently engages questions of immense affective power has been comparatively limited in
its pursuit of those lines of explanation located outside the terrain of ideas and politics.
This paucity of work is especially striking for the current focal point of academic inter-
est: the closing three decades of the twentieth century. Pioneering and transformative
new research on the intellectual and political provenance of rights has, to some degree,
outpaced the exploration of sentiment. Through a brief examination of emotion at vari-
ous moments of the postwar rights story, the article argues that the study of shifting
sentiment can substantially enrich accounts of human rights history, as it already has
done in other fields (Febvre 1973; Reddy 2001; Sheer 2012). It may well open an ave-
nue by which to transcend the present preoccupation on determining the intellectual
and social origins of the precipitous rise of rights discourse in the 1970s.
When seeking to chart the mechanisms by which passion operated within politics
and, at times, constructed and enabled new sorts of political movements, historians of
the 1940s and 1970s human rights renaissances, the two epicenters of the current histo-
riography, can draw usefully on the scholarly literature on the 1880s and 1790s. These
periods may not hold the full origins of the intellectual history of modern rights move-
ments, but the nuanced analysis of sentiment that has been given to earlier centuries is
an exemplar for how sympathy, reason, and context overlapped and interacted. In an
effort to move beyond the current debate on philosophical genealogies, the historiogra-
phy of postwar human rights can usefully go back to the future, to examine the ways
in which emotional mobilization advanced and shaped humanitarian projects. While
there has been a surplus of historiographic contention on the apparent ideological rup-
tures between rights crusades “old” and “new,” the affinities between preceding waves
of humane politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their more recent
counterparts, may well exist when studied on another axis — that of emotion and feel-
ing. Distant progenitors to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch can be
both absent and abundant, the answer being contingent on whether the question is one
on a shared set of political mobilizations based on sentiment or the variegated and
punctuated provenance of ideas.
 JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 125

Back to the future: The well-developed emotional history of humane sentiment

After several decades of pulsatile interest, emotion-oriented histories have begun to prolifer-
ate at a staccato cadence and now constitute an imposing body of scholarship (Matt 2011;
Matt and Stearns 2014; Rosenwein 2005, 2010; Sullivan 2013). A well-developed palette of
methods and approaches has been set out (Reddy 2001; Pampler 2015), with frames for
investigation ranging from timorously contextual close reading to fantastically speculative
psycho-biographical essentialism. The characterization of historical emotions has covered
the complete event space of unqualified universalism through to the strictest social and his-
torical constructivism. From the early 2000s onward, after this prolonged process of itera-
tion, much of the field has arrived at an intermediate position, exemplified in the flagship
monograph from William Reddy—cautious of inscribing the present upon those preserved
expressions of feeling from the past but sufficiently bold to escape the straightjacket of
extreme social constructivism. Despite the intrinsic difficulty of emotions history, there have
been some exceedingly innovative treatments that suggest the promise of “the emotional
turn” in the general case. Recent approaches that evaluate the social function within specific
contexts have moved the field away from static description and taxonomy and toward
explanatory utility. Furthermore, there is a catalogue of work on broadly proximate subjects,
sufficient to suggest the feasibility of these frameworks for understanding recent human
rights crusades, notably in the avowedly political sphere of international relations (Costi-
gliola 2000, 2015; Crawford 2000; Bleiker and Hutchinson 2008). Still more encouraging is
the maturity of methodological guidance, with a bespoke section on social and political
movements in the recent survey work from Pampler (2015: 277–282).
Given the rise of this rich constellation of histories of emotion and the coincident surge in
historical interest in human rights, the intersections have been unusually few. For a subject
that necessarily speaks to some of the most primordial concerns and needs of the human
person, the study of the postwar human rights project has often been sterilized of passion.
Law, philosophy, political science, approaches that for three decades defined the vast major-
ity of the academic literature, produced a human rights scholarship without the humans but
furnished with ample abstraction. Only a handful of works have, to date, pursued the emo-
tional dimension to human welfare and freedom in the modern era (Nussbaum 2013; Good-
win et al. 2004). The disciplinary formations that tended to dominate the scholarship have
been impersonal and structural; long catalogues of legal treatises and procedural evolutions,
intricate disquisitions of the philosophical basis for particular sets of rights, and highly theo-
rized analyses of the political order implicit in the international human rights system (Evans
2005). While more recent scholarship, in the past 15 years, from history and, to a lesser
degree, literary studies (Slaughter 2007), has begun to repopulate the human rights story
with its constituent humans, much work remains.
For human rights histories that pursue the more distant past and sibling work on human-
itarianism, there has been markedly more enthusiasm for mapping sentiment and dissecting
its role in political transformation (Crane 1934; Mullan 1988). In the traditional long geneal-
ogy of human rights, emotion has been firmly conjoined to the creation of a new set of con-
ditions from which rights were born, notably in the work of Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human
Rights (2007a). For Hunt (2007a, 2007b), the birth of human rights was intimately connected
with new means for the activation of human empathy—the rendering of affect with greater
fidelity in the form of the novel, the evocations of corporeal suffering by Cesare Beccaria,
126 R. BURKE

and the descriptions of the pitiable state of Jean Calas. These cases, favored in the deep ori-
gins account of human rights, tend to overlap with humanitarianism, a phenomenon some-
times bracketed as the discrete and distinct entity, where emotions are welcome, and
indispensable, pivots for explanation. The extent to which they were connected to the mod-
ern, postwar, human rights idea, at least in terms of a continuous philosophical tradition, is
less certain (Eckel and Moyn 2013: 5).
In the broad realm of “proto” human rights and humanitarian scholarship, the more dis-
tant the object of study, the more extensive the literature addressing emotion (Wilson and
Brown 2009; Abruzzo 2011; Rodgorno, 2012: 1–17). The institutional base for emotions his-
tory appears, at present, to have its nexus in the early modern period, extending to around
the early Edwardian age (Fiering 1976; Turner 1980; Clark 1995; Haltunnen 1995; Gil 2009;
Pearson 2011). Various parallel moral crusades of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, from animal welfare to the palliation of the worst abuses in armed conflict to the welfare
of women and children in the world of the Industrial Revolution, have all incorporated emo-
tion into their narratives, often with considerable skill. Histories of the Red Cross, for
instance, have navigated the mythology of the horrified Henri Dunant on the field of Solfer-
ino, but without dismissing the power of emotion (Rozario 2003). Works on Victorian
humanitarianism, in the form of the Congo Reform Association and the public scandal over
the treatment of civilians (invariably, women and children, or the meta-category of “waifs”)
in the South African War, have revealed the importance of emotion while also recognizing
its limits and problems (Hochschild 1999). The sympathy of humanitarians was almost
always genuine, but it almost always underwrote a politics of imperial paternalism (Barnett
2011, Skinner and Lester, 2012). Whatever feminism it held was no more radical than a
John Ruskin essay applied to women across the seas. Whatever racial equality it proposed
was almost always “of Christian spirits” at best.
In the sprawling literature on the sources and emergence of abolitionism in the Atlantic
World, Thomas Haskell (1985a, 1985b), David Brion Davis (1975), Seymour Drescher
(1986), and Robin Blackburn (2011) have sought to trace how the sinews and currents of
empathy, in the space of a decade, began to span oceans. While Haskell found the prove-
nance of this pan-Atlantic empathy as the emotional counterpart to international contracts
and mercantile modes of thoughts, another historian of the abolitionism, Adam Hochschild
(2005; compare with Huston 1990) found a more immediate and intimate source. Hochs-
child affords great significance to the impressment of very young British men to the Royal
Navy, which served as a rough proxy experience that allowed reflexive access to the pain of
those with their relatives wrenched from home by ships (2005: 220–225). The field of aboli-
tionist scholarship is vast, but, with the decline of economic determinist accounts, there is
an emerging consensus that has variants of empathy, however generated, at the foundation
of emancipationist agitation. Scholars of this era of humanitarianism have become, in the
past two decades, entirely comfortable with historicizing and problematizing emotion and
its political implications.
In a general sense, the politics of humanitarianism were always and everywhere those of
sympathy. Pity was its emotional register. Charity was its material expression. Even within
the crucible of the American Revolution, normally placed within the lineage of the ideologi-
cal, political, and legal human rights origin story, the basal metabolism that sustained revolu-
tion was an emotional one. As T. H. Breen (2010: 17–18, 101–127) has demonstrated,
widespread charitable works and physical solidarity, often in donations of food and clothing,
 JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 127

were evident from the early 1770s. Remarkably, given the damage already wrought by settler
colonials, an aid donation was made by Native Americans, who retained an affinity for the
men and women of Boston, and perhaps an unusually acute sense of suffering under military
coercion. Emotionally, the impulse in the American Colonies appeared a Janus of sympathy
and rage. While 1776 has often been cited in the lineage of legalistic individual rights and
popular sovereignty, its proto-nongovernmental organization (NGO) effort at human soli-
darity has been less widely recognized in human rights historiography. Colonial America
exhibited all legs of the modern triad of rights mobilization, including the low politics of
charity and empathetic advocacy.
The solidarity of this civil society was, admittedly, set within a much smaller set of com-
munities, and for people who were mostly similar in patterns of life and belief. Whether this
represented something like contemporary Human Rights NGO (HRNGO) work, based on
common humanity, is debatable. It was arguably closer to a sectional solidarity, like an inter-
cession for co-religionists as members of the same faith. Early transnational and imperial
solidarity expressions, notably those amongst labor movements, for instance, trans-Com-
monwealth donations to support British labor and cross-ocean solidarity with former French
Communards, are similarly difficult to categorize (Butterworth 2011: 248). Although ques-
tionable as a transnational rights activism, the dynamics held obvious similarity—and seem
to sit on a kind of mezzanine level not addressed by emotions historian Ute Frevert’s system
of national and transnational bounded communities of rights (2011: 77–83, 190–204).
While the capacity of these older expressions of rights and humanitarian to enact massive
political transformation has been recognized by myriad histories, the dynamics of the post-
1945 period are less clearly resolved. For works that operate within the long genealogy, such
as those of Lauren and Hunt, this poses no problem. There is an assumed continuity between
the operation and social understanding of emotion in the far and near past; the sort of empa-
thetic mobilizations of abolitionism were merely extended and renovated by postwar human
rights order. These mobilizations were expressed through different means and rallied to dif-
ferent causes, but they were driven by a shared centuries-old impulse. Each in the phasic bat-
tle to expand the circle of humanity was inspirited, almost literally, by those “sentiments that
nature has engraved on the heart of every individual” so enthusiastically proclaimed by
Lafayette in 1789 (Morsink 2011: 22). Given that many modern activists have tended to
locate their movements within a continuous historical story, the notion of a primordial, uni-
versalistic, transhistorical sentiment seems intuitively persuasive. The problem resides in the
immense diversity in both how this struggle has been pursued, and the plural emotional pal-
ette in which it has operated. Mobilization strategies span from the display of bloodied slave
manacles on a street in Georgian-era London, to the almost managerial description in a con-
temporary HRNGO portable document format (PDF), its banality optimized for either print
viewing or Web-based dissemination and replete with acronymic shorthand.
Recent work on the “breakthrough” from Barbara Keys has presented a superb analysis of
how a specific political milieu intersected with a moral and emotional transformation, pro-
ducing a revival in human rights idealism. In her pioneering study, Reclaiming American
Virtue (2014), Keys demonstrates that the American embrace of human rights in the 1970s
was in part a desire for atonement and moralistic self-assurance. Human rights mobiliza-
tions were a potent emotional salve to foreign policy failings; a catastrophic loss of self-righ-
teousness induced the pursuit of redemptive crusading, one that was distinctively averse to
state interventionism. Chastened by Vietnam, this modest idealism sought to do good by
128 R. BURKE

ensuring it did not actively facilitate evil. It was a moral impulse, and a form of human rights
activism, crafted to fit the anti-activist mood of a post-Vietnam environment.

Eleanor Roosevelt as realist: The aversion to “emotionalism” and the excesses

of hope
Although Keys has demonstrated the power of introducing emotion as a meaningful factor
in the historical explanation of the 1970s human rights movement, such attentive and metic-
ulous work is surprisingly sparse in accounts of the postwar development of rights dis-
courses. Human rights debates could literally bring participants to the point of being
“overcome” by feeling in the UN chambers, as was the case in 1961, when Togolese women’s
rights activist and national representative Marie Sivomey spoke in the most poignant terms
on the importance of a new Convention on Consent and Minimum Age for Marriage (Burke
2010: 128–129). Yet, even histories prepared by activists have been strangely exsanguinated
of the passion that defined their careers, albeit with some important exceptions, particularly
from those outside the political West (c.f. Jensen and Jolly 2014). This apparent unease
about any emotional component to human rights advocacy is not merely an artifact of pro-
fessional historians but a structural feature of Western diplomacy and rights advocacy,
which has often provided the point of origin, and foundational source base, for narratives of
the postwar human rights project.
John Humphrey, the founding director of the UN’s Human Rights Division, is decidedly
staid in much of the prose of his memoir (1984), only rarely unmasking flashes of anger,
frustration, and jealousy (often regarding the acclaim accorded to Rene Cassin). This is a
sharp contrast to his private diaries of the period, which were later published (Humphrey
et al. 1994), and are rather closer to confessional in their intonation. A somewhat more
impassioned approach is evident in dissident memoirs, from Vladimir Bukovsky (1978),
Anatoly Scharansky (1988), and Marıa Teresa Tula (1994). Tula, for instance, does reveal
markedly more of her interior world and thought. Memoirs from NGO activists, such as
those from Jeri Laber (2002) one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, and Aryeh Neier
(2005), adopt a finely calibrated level of the personal and the analytical. Perhaps the most
personalist is that from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2005), whose desperate efforts for human
rights in Central America are interlaced with private struggles with illness and its exacerba-
tion by human rights work while at the UN Commission sittings in Geneva. In short, the his-
toriography remains uncertain as to the position of sentiment within contemporary human
rights movements because their subjects, particularly from the Western world, were equally
uncertain. Almost all observed the importance of emotion in their project but were generally
reluctant to openly embracing it as a legitimate source of power. The empirical foundations
for a history of emotions in postwar human rights politics must be built from sources and
figures that alternatively effaced or denigrated emotion or, at least, did so in their written
pronouncements.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the formative moments of the modern
international human rights order, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The adoption of
the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the future beacon for count-
less human rights movements, was accompanied by euphoric professions of “a world
made new” (Glendon 2001). The emotional register, for some considerable period, was
one dominated by hope, albeit, a hope that was alloyed with heavy pragmatism from
 JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 129

the West, and frank cynicism from the Soviet bloc. Enthusiasm for the new spirit enun-
ciated by the UDHR was generally strongest amongst the representatives from Asia, the
Arab world, and Latin America, whose passion for ideals that few of their countries
were remotely close to achieving puzzled and frustrated the major Western foreign
services. Countries that, in terms of rational strategy, intuitively should have adopted
restraint and set a low horizon of ambition had rallied overexuberantly to the ideals of
the declaration. In the assessment of senior diplomats, not least Eleanor Roosevelt
(“first lady to the world,” and chair of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights), these
developing countries had a surplus of sentiment and a dearth of realism. They were
more enthusiastic about universal, transformative human rights crusading than was
proper for government officials.
The abundance of hope amongst these “Third World” representatives provided the basic
configuration for the early UN. In the later 1940s through to the mid-1950s, the battle for
the soul of human rights was defined by hyperambitious developing countries versus quib-
bling, and allegedly heartless, legalists from the Western world. This was manifest most
explicitly in a parallel debate to truncate the operations of the United Nations Children’s
Fund, UNICEF, which briefly interrupted other human rights and humanitarian agenda
items in late 1949 and again in 1950. The UNICEF fight witnessed speeches and invective
that was genuinely extraordinary and arguably exceeded any of the passions aroused previ-
ously on major Cold War security questions in Central and Southern Europe. US policy was
to enhance long-term technical assistance while retaining immediate relief, albeit with some
anticipated reductions owing to diminished need in Europe. It was not well met by the
assembly. Roosevelt was accused of being indifferent to the fate of starving children or,
indeed, outright signing their death warrants (Anonymous 1950: 39). UNICEF was retained,
with operations extended to those areas that had not been heavily damaged by the war. UK
representative, and future Labor luminary, Barbara Castle, was pleased with the outcome.
Nevertheless, she recognized it as a triumph of “the heart” rather than a technocratic assess-
ment of the merits of administering palliative relief without substantial local capacity-build-
ing (Castle 1950: 14–23).
After the trauma of the UNICEF issue, Roosevelt was an increasingly astute observer
of this mood, and the problems it posed for US policy. Her correspondence became
more insistent in its reporting of the sentiment of the less-developed states, which had
now begun to shape the UN rights forums in ways that were quite unlike the more
explicable and predictable ideological divisions of the early Cold War. The problem,
simply put, was an excess of feeling. In a letter to President Harry Truman in Decem-
ber 1950, Roosevelt tried to map out the nature of the problem. Across human rights
debates, she observed “members of the various delegations act with a good deal of free-
dom and less direction from the top” (Roosevelt 2012a: 486). Without direction, genu-
ine conviction was actually expressed by the smaller countries, or as Roosevelt termed
it, “what might be called honest-to-goodness trends of feeling” (Roosevelt 2012a: 486).
The First Lady of the World closed with a note of apologetic prophecy. “I realize I
sound like Cassandra,” she opined, “but I think this situation should be better under-
stood by our people as a whole and we should be bending every effort to correcting it
as soon as possible”(Roosevelt 2012a: 487). In a longer memorandum in December 1950,
Roosevelt elaborated on the corrosive effects of Third World mistrust for US human rights
diplomacy:
130 R. BURKE

They reflect jealousy and fear but if we expect to keep friends in the world and achieve peace, we
have got to show wisdom and understanding and finally win in this battle for the minds and
hearts of men. (Roosevelt 2012b: 505)

In a handful of months at the dawn of the 1950s, the substance of US initiatives had
become epiphenomenal; reflexive mistrust and resentment superseded anything Roosevelt
had to offer in the human rights arena, even when it was logically sound in technical terms
and almost certainly of material benefit to those who would vote against it.
With optimism came massive transformational ambition, which was fine material for the
exhortation of the 1948 Declaration, but an exceptionally difficult sentiment to inscribe into
its proposed successor, the legally binding human rights covenant. The Western countries,
which sought a highly precise treaty text on human rights, struggled to respond to demands
that seemed, to them, more emotional than legal:
We certainly lost leadership. We can’t count on their accepting anything we say just because we
say it. They don’t trust us; they don’t believe what we say. They don’t believe in our motives.
(Roosevelt 2012c: 633)

Success in human rights diplomacy required a new style, attentive to feelings, and to sen-
timent. It would require positive engagement with what were seemingly, to the West, often
fantastical propositions. For her part, Roosevelt, along with UK representative to the com-
mission, Marguerite Bowie, did try—primarily with a redefined understanding of what was
meant by rights, which allowed much more accommodation with the developing states.
However, apart from these efforts at the margins, no one within the US State Department or
the UK Foreign Office appeared to be able to deliver on this refashioned approach. Much as
Roosevelt did try to patch up personal bonds of affinity via friendly gestures and dinner par-
ties, under this carapace of social amity, an elemental distaste for optimism and utopian
ambition persisted, rehearsed across the countless Department of State and Foreign and
Colonial Office missives that issued forth with metronomic regularity after every General
Assembly session throughout the 1950s.
US diplomats, the legation of an otherwise dominant superpower, looked upon their dis-
credited position in the human rights arena with dismay. James Green, Roosevelt’s advisor,
was astonished that small, poor, and strategically vulnerable countries were voting with their
“feelings,” as opposed to what he deemed a realist calculation of their interests. Explaining
an otherwise inexplicable dissonance from the American agenda required recourse to essen-
tialist stereotype that such behavior was “emotional.” “Many members,” he lamented,
“seemed to me to be motivated by deep emotional convictions rather than by the political
considerations which are in evidence elsewhere in the assembly” (Foreign Relations of the
United States [FRUS] 1950: doc. 325: 578). For Green, it was self-evident that motivation
driven by conscience over politics was a lesser species of decision making; behavior that
might in other circumstances be described as integrity was infantilized. Emotion and its con-
joined pejorative, “emotionalism,” became the all-purpose explanatory repository for any
argument that did not conform to Western presumptions of the correct voting position. The
Third World was winning human rights battles and was pushing for an ambitious agenda
because they were passionate and unrealistic. With evident irritation and puzzlement, Green
noted that these Third World members in the human rights and humanitarian arena were
“functioning almost as though the ‘Cold War’ did not exist” (Foreign Relations of the United
States [FRUS] 1950: doc. 325: 578). The notion that such an effort to transcend Cold War
 JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 131

polarization was a legitimate response to the circumstances and aspirations of these new
states was seeming unavailable.
The easy binaries of thought that characterized so much US State Department reporting,
which arrayed the putative mature “reasonable” politics of restrained ambition and the juve-
nile utopianism of newer states, was just as susceptible to the epithet of “unreason.” Meeting
horror and inequity with equanimity and calculation was not reason; it was a self-satisfied
pantomime of rationality. By denigrating and disavowing the legitimacy and efficacy of a
politics founded on hope, Roosevelt, Green, and the dozens of legations that followed them
were foreclosing any prospect of the “world made new” they had so loudly proclaimed. The
disposition they dismissed as overpassionate posturing had produced perhaps the most
transformative international political movement in two centuries, that of abolitionism.
Amongst the greatest insights of Thomas Clarkson, as he sat weeping aside the road at
Wadesmill, was the frank insufficiency of academic modes of argument when confronted
with the most grotesque injustice (Clarkson 1788). In his case, the careful application of the
conventions of reason had preceded affective activation, and it was the pondering his own
scholarly prose that produced emotional epiphany. Meticulous reporting of the basis for out-
rage would create a redemptive, and rational, politics. Empirical exposition of the violations
was, to Clarkson, itself an “unanswerable” argument (Taylor 1839: 51). Reason, humanity,
and the political were superimposable. As his early biographer, Thomas Taylor, observed,
Clarkson’s logic held “that no measure can be politically right which leads to the commission
of cruelty or oppression.” The project was to recast this “violation of humanity” in political
terms—to reveal that slavery “was impolitic as well as unjust” (Taylor 1839: 50).
Erastian deduction alone did not answer human misery-salvation resided in the experien-
tial and the empathetic. When faced with inhumanity, the rhetorical forms of reason, those
sirens of incrementalism, pragmatic moderation, and consensus seeking, were themselves
profoundly unreasonable. As Clarkson would demonstrate, in his famous essay, and the cru-
sading life that followed it, the logical response to Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare was
more than an inductive treatise, it was to scream and to weep in protest. Dissonance between
horrified conscience and well-manned political action, or studied inaction, utterly perplexed
Clarkson and drove him to paroxysms of frustration. “How much my mind was agitated
and distressed on these accounts,” he lamented, “to have seen so many who could materially
have served our cause” but did not, despite being aware of the horror (Taylor 1839: 55–56).
Those who cauterized feeling and cleaved conscience from action were the most pathologi-
cal, not the most politic. Almost two centuries after Clarkson’s birth, and four score and ten
years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the custodians of such revolutionary hope were
no longer concentrated in the Atlantic world. By the standards internalized at Whitehall,
Foggy Bottom, and the Quai d’Orsay, Clarkson’s epoch defining 1785 essay against slavery
would have won no prize. It probably would have been fortunate to pass the senior bache-
lor’s examination in Latin.

Anger, despair, and disillusionment: The moods of human rights in the 1960s
and 1970s
This surfeit of hope was, ultimately, fleeting, as the optimism new postcolonial states drifted
from euphoric aspiration to a new set of emotions. Disgusted by continuing Western inac-
tion on South Africa, and racial discrimination more broadly, and with governments that
132 R. BURKE

had shifted from fragile liberal nationalist democracies to markedly more authoritarian
regimes, the mood of the UN rights program became one dominated by a narrow-band
anger. The human rights efforts of the commission and the assembly were canalized into a
crusade against a handful of odious regimes; most especially the racist dictatorship of apart-
heid South Africa, which were to be defeated by any and all means, including open violence.
Almost all other issues were pushed to the periphery and were met with neither hope nor
anger but with apathy and disengagement. Outrage at apartheid, residual colonialism, Israel,
and the appalling abuses of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile consumed whatever passions was
available—and depleted the reservoirs of any emotional energy that might otherwise have
been partitioned to the wider pursuit of human rights (Hoggart 1978: 94). Revolutionary
hope had been transmuted into resentment.
Almost every UN meeting from the late 1960s was tempestuous, with maximalism and
polemic the default vocabulary and the standard mode of speech. At the April 1968 World
Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran, normal diplomatic operations seem to have
been thrown out the window of the New Majlis building, which housed the proceedings. US
diplomats responded with a degree of a detached bemusement as the “the human rights con-
ference talked its way closer to failure,” and the Cuban representative “ranted about Yankee
imperialism to the point of utter boredom” (US Tehran 1968a: 4). Compromise was con-
signed to the margins, with the ventilation of outrage on racism and the remnants of imperi-
alism a higher order priority than plausible plans of action that might be embraced by a wide
coalition. Apartheid was a dominant concern, and the African group pressed for the most
uncompromising language possible and would not countenance any alteration to their draft
text, much to the irritation of the conference president, the Shah’s twin sister, Princess Ash-
raf, who was reportedly “visibly angered” by the “hard African line” (US Tehran 1968a: 1).
As the conference worked toward a final statement acceptable to all, the African group
sought to preference catharsis ahead of practicable consensus. When questioned by the US
legation as to “whether they realized” this approach was “jeopardizing possibility of unani-
mous approval of statement,” the leaders of the African group “replied very firmly that they
had decided that appropriate[ly] strong language was their overriding objective” (US Tehran
1968b: 1). The Arab-Israeli conflict was the other principal source of contention with forth-
right resolutions and acerbic exchanges. Soviet diplomats privately explained to their Ameri-
can counterparts that they appreciated such extreme texts “were useless” but, “after the
disaster of last summer,” the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, “Arabs must be pitied” (US Tehran
1968c: 2). Bizarrely, both Soviet and US officials took pity on each other, with a modus
vivendi to soften any direct Cold War assaults in Tehran–sealed over lunch. The two super-
powers reveled in their own sense of world-weary dignity and their shared affinity for a
bureaucratized and managerial diplomacy. They mused on the “prima donnas” that had
transformed the conference into a theatre of passion (US Tehran 1968d: 2). Both were seem-
ingly unable to fully grasp the stunning power of emotion, which had furnished the three,
and perhaps only, highlights of the three weeks of deliberation. They ignored the electrifying
speech from Rudolph Bystricky, who brought the Prague Spring to Tehran, stunned all pres-
ent, East, West, and Nonaligned (US Tehran 1968e). They failed to exploit the disruptive
potential of Roy Wilkins’ poignant reflection on the civil rights struggle and, its final coda,
the call for a minute’s silence for the murdered Dr. King, a gesture that silenced the serried
tables in the hall of the New Majlis and produced a demand for transcripts that outstripped
the capacity of the mimeograph (US Tehran 1968f). They overlooked the voice that had
 JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 133

survived the Holocaust and that of an ageing Rene Cassin, who sought to keep the memory
of 1948’s universality alive (United Nations 1968). Instead, the superpower legations pon-
dered how to produce an anodyne final conference text that would allow them to depart on
time from Mehrabad International Airport (US Tehran 1968g).
By the early 1970s, and reaching its fullest expression in the 1973 International Conven-
tion on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICPSA), the General
Assembly adopted a view of human rights that was barely more than juridically codified
provocation and abuse (United Nations 1973). With almost no social or liberal democratic
adherents, ratification of the ICPSA was worse than meaningless; it was negatively correlated
with domestic human rights performance. Its sole value inhered as charge sheet against the
apartheid regime, dressed in faux legality. Meanwhile, important and potentially transforma-
tive improvements to the monitoring system for the full panoply of rights enumerated in the
UDHR languished (Clark 1972). Proposals for a High Commissioner for Human Rights,
who would report on the human rights conditions in all states, were repeatedly deferred and
defeated. After a particularly crushing episode in 1970, the US postmortem ascribed failure
to an effective campaign of procedural obstruction from the Arab and Soviet states and the
unhelpfully “heated atmosphere” that dissuaded support. The American plan was to hope
for better conditions “after emotions have cooled for several months” (United States Mission
to the UN [USUN] 1970: 5). Such conditions would not arrive until 1993 when the Office of
High Commissioner was finally accepted.
The mood of 1948 had soured, to say the least. Violence of rhetoric was, on occasion, now
accompanied by physical threats and altercations. Most spectacular was the clash between
Castro’s foreign minister Ra ul Roa Garcıa and the Chilean delegate Raul Bazan, concerning
the fate of imprisoned Chilean communist Luis Corvalan. Expletives, delivered in Spanish,
and in the very upper range of available obscenity, were screamed across the General Assem-
bly chamber. Bazan advanced upon Roa, at which point, pistols were drawn and levelled by
the protective detail. The Chilean also found himself in a scuffle with the Saudi Ambassador,
Jamil Baroody (Anonymous 1973: 2). Less spectacular incidents saw Baroody attempt to
strike the Undersecretary General with a punch to the face (Anonymous 1971: E2). The
UN’s rights forums alternated between this kind of kinetic anger on privileged human rights
causes and somnambulant proceduralism on all the others. The risk of sleep amidst the bore-
dom was thought to be so severe that the US representatives were counselled on the grave
perils of intradebate slumber (Buckley 1974: 23–24). It was amongst the foremost items
impressed upon new inductees at their orientation.
Retaining the manners of indifference, which was a strong convention for all speeches
other than those on South Africa, colonialism, or Israel, induced a perversity in judgment:
an equality of affective response that betrayed the meaning of human rights. For the Ameri-
can representative, William Buckley, Jr., this was a challenge. “In the diplomatic world,”
Buckley explained, “you don’t get excited: it is part of the style… one mustn’t get excited at
what one hears at the UN, but for this you have to train” (Buckley 1974: 33). The training
was successful. An East German boasts about its impeccable human rights record was met
without demur, even by Buckley, whose anticommunist palmares were extensive. As Buckley
reported, after his familiarization with the ways of the UN, “there was not a stir in the room,
neither of approval nor of disapproval” (Buckley 1974: 151). For the exceptionally hardline
American conservative, this was now de rigueur, and he found it “quite conventional”
(Buckley 1974: 151). There was, according to Buckley, “hardly ever any reaction to a
134 R. BURKE

delegate’s statement in committee” and “nothing… to suggest genuine outrage after such
studied travesties as East Germany” (Buckley 1974: 151). Experience of the UN had become
a sort of mindfulness training, one that cultivated equanimity when faced with inhumanity.
With the UN a poisoned forum for hope, captivated by an anger that was more obstruc-
tive than enabling and often drained of sincerity by the long journey through endless strata
of proceduralism, the halls of the General Assembly were progressively evacuated of mean-
ingful human rights activism. Once the epicenter for human rights activity and the locus for
utopianism, this forum for international organization was now a distinctly unpromising
realm for serious initiatives. Activism migrated to a new set of sites, distributing what power
it had to smaller nodes. Disillusioned with the angry stasis of the UN forums, the HRNGO
movement, exemplified by a renascent and rapidly growing Amnesty International, the
International League for Human Rights, and, later, the Helsinki organizations and Human
Rights Watch, formulated a new strategy for human rights advocacy. They would eschew
the legalism of the moribund UN, and appeal directly to the heart, reviving human rights
with the power of pity. Their chosen causes, notably opposition to torture, and the plight of
individuals seeking to emigrate from Eastern Europe, were those that spoke fluently to emo-
tion and, principally, to pity. Necessarily, this appeal to affect change altered the balance of
what human rights entailed. Complicated arguments on judicial and legislative structures, or
the welfare systems required for the realization of economic, social, and cultural rights, were
not readily set within the language of pity and empathetic solidarity. The most effective cam-
paigns of the new transnational, NGO-led, human rights crusades of the late 1970s and early
1980s were those that were most affective. Appalling stories of the most awful torture, of
arbitrary imprisonment, and of extrajudicial killing and detention, the “disappearances”
were the dark stars around which the movement would orbit.
Amongst the most powerful was the advocacy movement for those who had been “Disap-
peared” by the Argentinian military dictatorship, a social mobilization that enjoined not
merely concerned Western middle classes but the transcultural force of parental love and
concern. Where conventional liberal advocacy for the rule of law failed, the Mothers of the
Plaza de Mayo found a small measure of success (Brysk 1994; Flood, 1998). Habeas corpus
petitions from blue-suited lawyers found no answer from those in military uniform, except-
ing those instances where the answer was the disappearance of the petitioner. Yet, the moth-
ers found means that could pierce the phalanx of “national security” rhetoric. Their appeals
for their lost children, couched in hyperconservative maternalism, rendered the junta’s
feigned obliviousness, which had long been implausible, dangerously ineffectual. Fernando
Bosco (2006) and Marguerite Guzman Bouvard (1994: 247–250) have prepared excellent
analyses of the creative synthesis between reason and feeling that lent the mothers such force
and the considerable complexity and contradiction within the movement. Genuine grief and
desperation for knowledge were self-consciously deployed; for the mothers, emotional sin-
cerity was political strategy, and maternalism could be both felt and strategically invoked
(Bonner 2007: 146–148). Parental affect has continued to shape the nucleus of the Argentine
human rights movement, notably through the grandmothers’ organization, which devotes
much of its advocacy to the fate of infants stolen by the regime (Arditti 1999). Tellingly,
crimes of child abduction were amongst the few cracks in the barrier of self-amnesty erected
by the outgoing junta and one of the handful of opportunities for some small quantum of
accountability.
 JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 135

Emigration of individual Soviet citizens, typically members of the persecuted Jewish com-
munity, was perhaps the signature example of the promising but problematic results of this
new dynamic of rallying to sympathetic individual cases and abandoning systemic transfor-
mation. Short of petitioning for exit visas to be granted to the majority of the Soviet citi-
zenry, excepting perhaps a few dozen from the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet,
emigration was only ever the most partial melioration of the abuses that inhered in totalitar-
ian rule. Equally, the emotional pull of desperate individuals was so irresistible, and the per-
ceived prospects of near-term political reform so slender, that an argument that piously held
to equilateral pursuit of all human rights for the aggregate population was too callous for
either gentle liberals or rabid anticommunists to countenance. A true cause to celebrate in
the late 1970s—freedom to emigrate (from the Soviet Union)—was at one point openly
exalted as the most important article of the UDHR (Keys 2014: 118–123, see also Hirsch
2010). Of itself, it was a reasonable tactical decision, but it rested on an assumption that radi-
cal improvement of the world was well beyond the outer bounds of possibility. The “break-
through” moment of the 1970s, so well documented by recent scholars, rested on a much
grimmer disposition than the human rights ideals of the late 1940s.
It is here that the symmetry between the 1970s and the 1790s is most striking—and the
“new historians” disavowal of a comparability or consonance of character most problematic.
Horror, disgust, and the search for some modest palliation of grotesque abuses against per-
son was at the center of the abolitionist cause. Feeling profound was advertised as virtue and
was allied with reason and conventional political legitimacy. For many of the British aboli-
tionists, there was no tension between florid expression of sympathy, sickening description
of the Middle Passage, and an eminently respectable politics founded upon integrity. Fidelity
to feeling, and advocating political reform without the constraints of economic loss or the
seeming impossibility of the task, was an approach that ineluctably followed knowledge of
slavery. By contrast, accepting dissension between heart and vote when it came to humanity
was an unnatural derangement of the proper operation of conscience. Emotion allowed
more than a politics of adamantine conviction; it also facilitated transcendence. In the ante-
bellum phase of the struggle in the United States, the partitioning between horror and hope
was, at key points, configured toward the latter. As recent work from Michael Woods has
documented (2014), the political efficacy of an appeal to hope was unmistakable — and
unmistakably effective for overcoming factionalism. Seemingly insuperable political differ-
ence was solvable when denominated in the currency of soaring ambition and radical hope.
So too, are the symmetries and continuities apparent in the humanitarianism of the 1900s
and the human rights of the 2000s, which coalesced around the most hideous disfigurement
of individuals by the violence of the unseen and the unaccountable. Tragically, the geo-
graphic focal point of their respective advocacy was unchanged; the descendants of the
bloodied victims of Leopold’s Congo were the victims of arguably the deepest and most prev-
alent physical violations a century later in the Second Congo War. In their preference for a
public mobilization as opposed to discreet co-option of the powerful, the Edwardian-era
activists Roger Casement and Edmund Morel and a raft modern human rights campaigners
elected for a kind of redemptive revelation of the suffering. Advocates for the victims of
sexual violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo rendered the corporeal
damage in a highly effective manner. Casement and Morel’s stark silver-nitrate photos
of mutilated Congolese found their sequel in images of traumatized women captured on a
compact disc, written to solid-state memory and circulated across the world; the
136 R. BURKE

impassioned pleas in Red Rubber (Morel 1919), for common human feeling, found their
echo in the theatre productions that sought to induce such feeling through dramatic perfor-
mance (Bystrom 2013).

Conclusions
Historians of postwar human rights have a difficulty shared by their subjects, insofar as both
of their projects require an appreciation of something more than reason but have an uncer-
tainty as to precisely where and how the “unreasoned” aspect of freedom and humanity can
be incorporated. With the high explanatory yield already provided by richly rendered gene-
alogies of ideas, political currents, and grander global trends, the urgency of drawing upon
emotion and sentiment has been more weakly felt. While older proto-human rights move-
ments from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were overtly sentimentalist in language
and enacted their crusades through more explicit emotional appeals, postwar human rights
activism was more self-consciously modest about harnessing passion. Both generations of
activism harvested affective power, but with a pronounced difference in the visibility by
which they captured emotional energy. In the postwar high moment of human rights, in the
1940s, international institutions, laws, treaties, and formalized NGO movements ablated and
channeled emotion. It operated more as a subterranean force than the open mainsails for
passion that characterized nineteenth-century abolitionism or the gruesome and detailed
reporting of early humanitarian activists like Morel and Casement.
An impressionistic survey of the course of major human rights debates immediately after
the triumphant adoption of the 1948 UDHR suggests that emotion and mood were impor-
tant and influential forces in shaping the trajectory of the modern human rights enterprise.
The unease of this first phase of postwar human rights activism about its animating senti-
ments is precisely what makes this dimension of its history important. Its aversion to over-
passionate expression is not a warning but, rather, a powerful invitation. The very reluctance
of some iconic contemporary human rights advocates, notably Roosevelt, to utilize unalloyed
sentimentalism, and their enthusiasm for disavowing emotion and elevating reason, legal-
ism, and philosophical “self-evidence,” speaks to how human rights activism had been
reconfigured after 1945. Whereas once emotionalism was an advertised asset, loudly pro-
claimed by abolitionists and nineteenth-century humanitarians, in the judgement of the
postwar champions of rights, these were, for whatever reason, inefficacious, indecorous, or
otherwise impermissible. Overt claims to feeling and empathy remained a powerful means
for inspiriting a large moral catchment in past ages but were no longer perceived as legiti-
mate. They had to be disavowed precisely as they were drawn upon.
Only later, in the 1970s, in the era of “breakthrough,” was emotion once more remade as
respectable–and it became so when freed of a formal, institutionalized, international system
of diplomacy. The emotional content was itself appreciably different—decidedly unhopeful
and insistently anti-utopian. Conjoined to its highly limited vision of redemption, princi-
pally an end to torture, it had much less reliance on the state and much less inclination to
efface the sentiment that gave it whatever power it held. As humanitarians of earlier centu-
ries had discovered, the shared sympathy of shocked hearts was a more durable protection,
and a less fickle source of remedy, than reliance on the dispensations of the elite—be it par-
liamentary, congressional, or international organizational. An intense suspicion that formal
diplomacy was the world of sovereigns, and inherently corrupt, or, at least, highly
 JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 137

corruptible, was a persistent tendency. Those measures that tended to decouple the cause
from sentimentality and translate passionate demands into demure disquisitions were
viewed with skepticism—evident in Morel’s book-length tirades against secret diplomacy
and its inhuman consequences (Morel 1916: 104–113), through the mid-1970s reaction to
Kissinger’s realism, to the lingering distaste of contemporary HRNGOs for the purported
merits of “quiet diplomacy” and “constructive engagement.” The perils of abstracting senti-
ment to win state patronage were learnt, unlearnt, and relearnt by each generation. Humani-
tarian movements often oscillated from an embrace of bureaucratized institutions as a
desirable instrument for advancing moralistic enterprise to the vehement rejection of any
accommodation in manner or language and a return to less mediated passion. What induced
these periodic shifts is perilously unclear and does not readily map to either of the two pre-
vailing narratives of human rights history, “long” or “short.” Complementary to the now
impressively sophisticated ideological and intellectual genealogies is the pursuit of narratives
more attentive to how emotion was understood and deployed. Recovering these is perhaps
the next enterprise for those historians of human rights who have mapped the political
dimensions of the idea and its movements so comprehensively.

Notes on contributor
Roland Burke is a lecturer in history at La Trobe University and the author of Decolonization and the
Evolution of International Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania, 2010). His recent research has
focused on shifts in the meaning of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Journal of
Global History), the formulation of economic and social rights, and the New International Economic
Order (Humanity, Journal of World History, Humanity, Human Rights Quarterly, History Australia).
He has contributed chapters to edited collections on human rights, empire, and humanitarianism. At
present, he is completing a monograph on competing visions of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (Human Rights in Eclipse).

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