Campaigns for international human rights represent a vibrant part of the social activism landscape in Britain. Established nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, such as Amnesty International are widely recognized for their work in documenting and campaigning against global human rights violations. Mark Hurst's debut monograph investigates the rise of several influential British human rights NGOs, focusing on those groups that campaigned to assist dissidents in the Soviet Union facing official persecution for their political and religious beliefs. Hurst specifically concentrates on the period between the mid-1960s (when Soviet abuses were first publicized in the West) and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika in the mid-1980s, which accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet state.
Hurst frames his account from the outset as a contribution towards the historiography of human rights (1). Inspired by Samuel Moyn's seminal account of human rights emerging as the “last utopia” in the 1970s, he explores how a range of British human rights organizations emerged and coalesced around the Soviet dissident issue in the 1960s. Hurst's central argument is that these groups struggled for relevance and recognition in the 1960s, and could only flourish and rise to prominence after the mid-1970s due to a changing international environment more conducive to human rights norms and values. Through his focus on groups of activists, the book also contributes towards a burgeoning historical literature on NGOs (3), which uses non-state actors as a prism through which to illuminate political and social change in Britain.
The book is structured into five chapters, grouped into three thematic sections. Chapters 1 and 2 consider how British activists responded to systematic abuses of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. These abuses resulted in thousands of dissenters being hospitalized for political motivations. From modest beginnings in the early 1960s, organizations such as the Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, the Medical and Scientific Committee for Soviet Jewry, the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse, and Amnesty International collectively professionalized and developed into high profile and internationally coordinated NGOs on the issue of Soviet psychiatry by the late 1970s.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine the British response to Soviet religious persecution, focusing on the Women's Campaign for Soviet Jewry (the famous “35's”) and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism (more commonly known as Keston College). Hurst documents how these groups transformed over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, from marginalized amateurs into professionalized NGOs with considerable popular support and political influence. The Women's Campaign for Soviet Jewry is a particularly intriguing case study in this regard, as it evolved rapidly from a naïve and ill-informed group into a recognized and trusted source of information on Soviet Jewry, with close connections to government (101).
Chapter 5 investigates Amnesty International, generally recognized as the most influential human rights NGO since its inception in the early 1960s. Hurst explores how Amnesty's campaigning for Soviet dissidents was always entangled with the organization's broader drive to appear impartial and neutral in the Cold War, and discusses the inherent difficulties and tensions associated with maintaining such a position (150). In documenting Amnesty's genesis and historical trajectory, Hurst makes an important contribution to the historiography of a particularly significant British NGO.
This is a meticulously researched book, which features substantial primary research undertaken in the archives of NGOs and individuals in Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. Supplementing this archival work are oral histories, memoirs, media articles, and published reports. The connection of Soviet dissidents with British activists is a new and welcome transnational perspective, which advances our understanding of how international human rights campaigning unfolded during a critical moment in its own history.
However, the book's contribution is limited by weaknesses in methodology, approach, and argument. All five chapters are essentially organizational narratives of how different NGOs developed from the 1960s to the 1980s, highlighting their institutional structures, key personnel, internal decision making, financial constraints, and lobbying tactics. While of interest to specialists, Hurst does not sufficiently connect these descriptive narratives with larger questions and debates in the wider historiography. Furthermore, the book's central argument (that these NGOs could only gain recognition in the late 1970s because of structural shifts in international relations) is reductionist and lacks nuance. Hurst accepts this shift as objective fact and never complicates it, nor does he fully explain how studying British human rights campaigns for Soviet dissidents can shed new light upon it.
The book would be enhanced significantly by contextualizing its account of British human rights NGOs in broader and intersecting historical trajectories. These could have included the end of empire, détente, technological developments in the mass media, shifting attitudes towards distant suffering, rising affluence and post-materialism, changes in religious belief, and structural shifts in the political left. Given the focus on Britain, the lack of any reference to empire was particularly surprising to this reviewer, as decolonization and a retreat from imperial violence may provide one alternative explanation for an upsurge in human rights in the 1970s. Ultimately, for a book that is concerned with British human rights activism between the 1960s and the 1980s, Hurst's has remarkably little to say of substance on the changing cultural, economic, political, and social environment within Britain itself during this period.
Hurst's monograph thus misses an inviting opportunity to connect its empirical case studies to larger historiographies on international human rights, NGOs, global governance, and modern British history. While this lack of range unfortunately constrains the book's relevance, it remains a finely researched and impressively synthesized work of historical scholarship. The book will interest not only historians of British NGOs and Soviet dissidents, but all scholars concerned with how modern human rights campaigns have been waged against authoritarian states.
