‘With Friends Like These’: Human Rights, Neoconservatism and U.S. Foreign Policy from Carter to Reagan.

Abstract

This thesis engages with two emerging bodies of scholarship: the history of human rights and the history of U.S. neoconservatism. It begins with an exploration of the genesis of the contemporary international human rights movement, arguing that human rights as we know and understand them today were a product of the latter half of the twentieth century. Their path, however, was not a clear one. The emergence of neoconservative ideology in U.S. domestic politics would greatly impact upon the trajectory of the human rights movement under the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The latter period witnessed a conflict between America’s Watch and the Reagan administration over human rights as an ‘idea’ and as praxis, with U.S. policy towards Latin America as the primary battle field .