Virtual Library

As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, "The United States was founded on the proclamation of 'unalienable' rights, and human rights ever since have had a peculiar resonance in the American tradition." But the American fondness for human rights rhetoric has presented two fundamental problems in foreign policy. As first a reluctant great power and then a more willing superpower, the United States has faced the traditional conflict between commitment to human values and exercise of power for other interests. Equally importantly in an interdependent and nonhegemonic world, the United States has painfully discovered that the American and international versions of human rights are not the same. This article traces the workings of these twin dialectics (rights rhetoric and national interests, and rights rhetoric and community standards) from 1945 to the present in order to suggest that the United States, despite its dominant power, has not been the major shaper of community standards or international regimes on human rights; the United States in its bilateral diplomacy is still struggling to locate precisely human rights on its foreign policy agenda; the Congress, while it still does not codetermine human rights in foreign policy, is ignored and by-passed only at peril for an administration. Ultimately this article suggests that some painful political socialization is in store for the United States when it deals with human rights in foreign policy, especially since human rights in its many and complex forms is here to stay on both the U.S. and global agendas.

Traditionalists in the field of security studies tend to restrict the subject to politico–military issues; while wideners want to extend it to the economic, societal, and environmental sectors. This book sets out a comprehensive statement of the new security studies, establishing the case for the broader agenda.

The authors argue that security is a particular type of politics applicable to a wide range of issues. Answering the traditionalist charge that this model makes the subject incoherent, they offer a constructivist operational method for distinguishing the process of securitization from that of politicization. Their approach incorporates the traditionalist agenda and dissolves the artificial boundary between security studies and international political economy, opening the way for a fruitful interplay between the two fields. It also shows how the theory of regional security complexes remains relevant in today's world.

The U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years—and fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism. At the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States. She explores the ways in which diverse Americans—including activists, intellectuals, artists, missionaries, marines, and politicians--responded to paternalist constructs, shaping new versions of American culture along the way. Her analysis draws on a rich record of U.S. discourses on Haiti, including the writings of policymakers; the diaries, letters, songs, and memoirs of marines stationed in Haiti; and literary works by such writers as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Pathbreaking and provocative, Taking Haiti illuminates the complex interplay between culture and acts of violence in the making of the American empire.