MAKEINTL · Making Amnesty international: connections, disconnections, and the uneven geography of international human rights, 1961-2001
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-05-01 → 2024-11-17
- EU contribution
- €178,320
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Making Amnesty international: connections, disconnections, and the uneven geography of international human rights, 1961-2001
This MSCA Individual Fellowship centred on the project ‘Making Amnesty international: connections, disconnection and the uneven geography of international human rights, 1961-2001’. This project used the human rights organisation Amnesty International as a window onto the following questions: How does an organisation become international? How does it overcome the political, social, cultural and material barriers to cross-border, multi-scale collaboration – and what happens if it can’t overcome them? In focusing on these questions, the Action aimed to contribute to the effective pursuit of global partnerships, one of the key Sustainable Development Goals. The scientific objectives of this project were to identify the political, material and historical conditions that both facilitated and hindered the development of Amnesty International, comparing these conditions in different parts of the world, to understand how the uneven geography of Amnesty International shaped its understanding of human rights, and the generation of novel concepts and outputs for use in research, teaching, and policy for the understanding of international NGOs and activist networks, North-South cooperation and collaboration, and international human rights. The project also aimed to enhance the researcher’s skills through training, widening both her scientific knowledge and capabilities, as well as her organisational and other soft skills. These questions are important for society as building cross-border collaborations, especially ones across North-South lines, are essential for confronting global challenges like climate change. By qualitatively investigating an example of people coming together to confront the ‘global challenge’ of human rights violations, this project shows how the manner in which people come together, they type of organisation or network they built, and the barriers that remain to collaboration, shaped the very notion of human rights. This has important lessons for civil society organisations, for policy makers and for ordinary citizens concerned about international scale issues.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
How does an organisation become international? How does it overcome the political, social, economic, cultural and material barriers to transnational collaboration - and what happens when it can't overcome them? This project explores this question by taking a global look at the creation of Amnesty International, one of the most well-known international non-governmental organisations in the world. This project will map the development of Amnesty from its origins in Europe in 1961 to its uneven spread across the globe throughout the following four decades, up until 2001. Using case studies from within the organisation it will clearly identify the factors that both facilitated and hindered its growth in different places, explaining why, after taking root in north-western Europe, some international branches proved fruitful while others withered. This difficult process of internationalising the organisation suggests that there are important limits and borders that global activism and international ideas must traverse. These limits are rarely examined, but without an understanding of them and the impact they had on the work done in the name of human rights, we are left with a distorted view of one of the most important political concepts of our time. Amnesty is commonly characterised as playing a crucial role in shaping contemporary understandings of human rights. The project analyses the ways that the uneven geography of Amnesty’s development shaped these understandings. As such, it constructs a historical geography of human rights that will be relevant to scholars, teachers and practitioners in the fields of international human rights cooperation and international organisations.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN · LeuvenCoordinatorBelgium
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union