The American angle towards human rights is deemed inconsistent, even hypocritical: whereas the us is characterised (or self-characterized) as a world chief in selling human rights, the state has continually constrained broader interpretations of human rights and held overseas enforcement mechanisms at arm's size. Human Rights and the Negotiation of yankee Power examines the reasons, outcomes, and tensions of America's development because the top international strength after international conflict II along the flowering of the human rights circulation. via cautious archival study, Glenn Mitoma unearths how the U.S. executive, key civil society teams, chilly conflict politics, and particular participants contributed to America's emergence as an ambivalent but principal participant in developing a world rights ethic.

Mitoma makes a speciality of the paintings of 3 American civil society organisations: the fee to check the association of Peace, the nationwide organization for the development of coloured humans, and the yankee Bar Association—and their effect on U.S. human rights coverage from the overdue Nineteen Thirties throughout the Fifties. He demonstrates that the burgeoning transnational language of human rights supplied popular United international locations diplomats and constitution individuals of the fee on Human Rights—Charles Malik and Carlos Romulo—with clean and crucial possibilities for influencing the location of the USA, such a lot quite with appreciate to constructing international locations. taking a look at the serious contributions made by means of those males, Mitoma uncovers the original explanations, tensions, and effects of yank exceptionalism.