Sovereign Emergencies

Patrick William Kelly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently writing a global history of AIDS.

• List of figures; Introduction; 1. Torture in Brazil; 2. The emergency in Chile; 3. Transnational solidarity; 4. Redefining sovereignty; 5. The origins of American human rights activism; 6. The global specter of Argentina's disappeared; 7. Argentina and the inter-American system; Epilogue: the promise and limits of the human rights cascade; Index.

'In this lucid, informed, and clear account, Kelly shows how a succession of regimes in the 1960s, 70s and 80s chose the human body as their staging ground for ideological warfare, and how out of these nightmares the defense of what came to be known as human rights was born. An indispensable history of modern Latin America.' Alma Guillermoprieto, former journalist for The Guardian, the Washington Post, and The New York Times, and author of The Heart that Bleeds: Latin America Now