This second historical chapter provides some important episodes in ICRC history between about 1910 (the death of both Dunant and Moynier) and the end of the Cold War (which is when the rest of the book takes off). Thus the chapter introduces the ICRC through a selected review of its history, emphasizing: the development of international humanitarian law and the global Red Cross network, helping to apply that law and Red Cross Fundamental Principles through assistance and protection in the field, and related activities such as protection of political prisoners. All of this sets the stage for a close analysis of the ICRC since the end of the Cold War and particularly since about 2012. If one wants to know if the ICRC is now in demise, one needs a picture of what it was and did in the past.

Continuing the preceding discussion, this chapter addresses the subject of protecting political prisoners. This topic is more difficult for an outside analyst to understand given the lack of public information about the details of the subject. The author believes that the organization in general, particularly through its varied field operations, continues to pursue the subject with consistency, even if without major breakthroughs known to the public. There are probably achievements here and there, as new agreements are quietly reached, or existing visits expanded. Field offices and the protection unit in Geneva do stay busy on the subject, even if it seems that certain high officials have not prioritized the subject. Attention is given to the relation between assistance and traditional protection. Also important to understand is the “all prisoner” approach by the ICRC, and whether this broad scope is sustainable – and does or does not lead to progress in protecting political (and conflict) prisoners.

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.

Activists from animal liberation, earth liberation, and intersectional environmental justice movements have been frequently imprisoned as punishment for their resistance efforts and as a way to neutralize their efficacy, which means they have fewer means to promote justice for nonhumans and humans alike. This injustice is compounded because carceral institutions are literally built on and rely upon the bodies and territories of nonhumans and vulnerable human populations, producing massive harms across species and space. This chapter examines these tensions and dynamics with an eye toward articulating and embracing justice for political prisoners and, more broadly, multispecies justice.

In the late 1920s, at the same time as the centralization of Iran’s legal system, the nascent Pahlavi state inaugurated a carceral system and imaginary in which modern prisons were promoted as necessary and progressive solutions to myriad social crises. In this era, Pahlavi statesmen and law enforcement officials attended conferences on policing and prisons in Europe, drawing architectures and techniques of punishment from those sources and working to dramatically expand Iran’s carceral system. This chapter examines state discourses on the prison in the aftermath of legal centralization and argues the mid-century Iranian government claimed its new-look prison system as a success story in its modernizing efforts. By vastly expanding Iran’s prison system and extolling the social virtues of its penal factories and literacy classes, the Pahlavi government marked the prison as a space of rehabilitation in which the bad criminal could be reformed into the good citizen, normalizing the incarceration of increasing numbers of Iranians in the process. This chapter also examines the establishment of the academic field of criminology in Iran, which emerged at the same time as these state-led reform efforts. Charting the rise of social scientific debates on crime and punishment, this chapter argues that this new academic discipline mapped onto the state’s modernizing sentiments regarding productivity, citizenship, rehabilitation, and modern progress.

This chapter analyzes how political prisoners in 1980s Poland sought to put their plight on the agenda of East–West relations. In so doing, this chapter reconstructs a central symbol of 1980s global human rights culture: the prisoner of conscience. The prisoner of conscience, the chapter shows, was the result of how Amnesty International had reimagined the struggle against political incarceration. In the past, this struggle had been driven by solidarity with political prisoners' specific ideology; Amnesty's activism, in contrast, centered on empathy with the plight of suffering individuals who tried to defend their very humanity against an all-powerful state. By drawing on this discourse and the social practices associated with it, especially hunger strikes, the Polish prisoners managed to turn themselves into icons of human rights culture, quasi-sacred images of the international community's most hallowed values. Yet this process also divorced the prisoners from the specific political aims they were struggling for, allowing powerful international actors to project their own views onto them. For all its antipolitical imagery, the chapter shows, the “prisoner of conscience” was part of a symbolic politics of human rights.

This chapter examines settlement practice on detention in light of international humanitarian law and human rights law. Section 2 identifies the international legal frameworks that regulate detention, drawing the necessary distinctions between peacetime and armed conflict, and between international and non-international armed conflict, which frame questions on relevant applicable law. Section 3 then examines the specific legal norms relating to prisoners of war and civilian detainees within international armed conflict and their interaction with settlement practice; while Section 4 does the same in relation to legal norms regulating detention in non-international armed conflicts. In the context of peace agreements, the focus is on two interconnected issues which extend into a post bellum phase, as important subject matter for settlement practice: release and repatriation; and transitional justice. By way of conclusion, Section 5 considers whether settlement provisions on detainees reflect a common practice that develops international legal standards.

This chapter surveys the South African state’s engagement with the international normative languages which emerged after 1945. Its focus is on the sustained effort to reconfigure apartheid into a form compatible with the lexicon of human rights, self-determination, and multicultural pluralism. Beginning in the early 1960s, apartheid, rebadged “separate development,” was interlaced with norms on self-determination, identity, and economic development. Apartheid was reset in a form which deferred to the prevailing ideals of the period, an effort that was never convincing, but was, in broad terms, disturbingly coherent. Drawing on South African archives and underutilized public relations tracts, it demonstrates that National Party ideologues were conversant in the new internationalist phraseology. Their agility remains a powerful example of how discourses of human welfare and freedom hold ample capacity for subversion into authoritarian instrument. Apartheid, a project of essentialist, racially determined nationalism, could be, and was, translated into various emancipatory and internationalist dialects.

Chapter 3 looks at how far questions of human rights contributed to the campaigns against political imprisonment during the 1950s. The Cold War forms the inescapable context: the left campaigned for left-wing prisoners, and the right for right-wing prisoners. Peter Benenson challenged this binary distinction when he set up the cross-party lawyers’ organisation Justice in 1956. The chapter discusses Benenson’s early career, as well as that of Eric Baker, who would work closely with him in Amnesty. The two men first worked together in Cyprus during the Emergency of 1955-1959. Baker’s Quaker heritage is explored, as well as his support for the influential Italian social activist Danilo Dolci. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various campaigns that were launched in the late 1950s and early 1960s for an amnesty for political prisoners in Spain, Portugal and Greece. These were essentially left-wing campaigns, but it is argued that they had much in common with later ‘human rights‘ campaigns and are worthy of serious study.