What if we start from South Asia?
Human rights historiography is largely diplomatic history. Even histories that centre the Third World focus on diplomats at the UN and state actors. While Amnesty is seen as a handmaiden of the human rights breakthrough of the 1970s - encapsulated in its receipt of the 1977 Nobel prize - this is largely due to its work advising and shaping the Carter Government’s human rights foreign policy in the US. This connection to the US, in turn, as well as the fact that its headquarters were in London, has contributed to the organisation being seen as a western organisation by many historians and other scholars. But if we look at the above image of Amnesty on stage, receiving the 1977 Nobel Prize, we can see hints of another story. Standing centre stage is Suriya Wickremasinghe, an activist from Sri Lanka. What if we took her central position in this photo further, and considered her as central to Amnesty and the history of human rights itself?
A methodological note.
The idea of ‘starting from’ South Asia comes from Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate’s article, ‘What if we start from Nigeria?’, where they argue that the view from ‘elsewhere’ offers entire different perspectives on historical developments. This is also what international historians such as Su Lin Lewis argue in their call to ‘decolonise’ international history. These recent scholarly approaches resonate with my own interest in Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography, which she subtitled a ‘sociology for people’. Smith argued not only that ‘starting from’ the standpoint of non-dominant social actors provided a different perspective, but that it would result in a sociology that could be used by those actors to transform the very strucutres that goverened their lives. Also central was her idea that these non-dominant actors were in fact the experts on how any given social structure or bureaucratic or institutional process operated (not those who designed it). These ideas have guided this entire project.
If we start from Sri Lanka, how might that change our understanding of what Amnesty was, and why people joined?
“Steeped in the tradition of international solidarity, we now looked for a little of it for our own country’s problems. Here again we were to be disappointed. Governments and groups of one sort of orientation or affiliation were hesitant to take a position because they felt here was a democratically elected government, threatened by an uprising of dangerous Marxist insurgents. Those of the “other” orientation saw a “progressive” Government in which there were Marxist parties … so ipso facto the insurgency had to be a right-wing CIA-fed neo-imperialist conspiracy! To our relief we stumbled on Amnesty International which was totally disinterested in the political affiliations of either the government or the insurgents and only wanted the facts please.”
— Suriya Wickremasinghe