Reconsidering the Human Rights “Deep Freeze”: Humanitarian Aid, Law, and U.S. Foreign Affairs in the Cold War

This presentation aims to complicate the traditional story that the U.S. turned away from human rights as a motivating rationale of U.S. foreign relations during the “human rights deep freeze” occurring between the early 1950s and 1970s.  By refocusing the historical lens somewhat away from official state activities and toward certain U.S.-based NGOs, I argue that we can see a flurry of war relief activities during this period that embraced some core human rights ideals enshrined in contemporary international documents, institutions and politics, but that were fueled more by an older ethos of humanitarian obligation than human rights.  I seek, in other words, a way to see human rights as only one set of discourses and practices deployed by American people and institutions that were designed to address affronts to human dignity in the post-World War II era.  And I suggest that these developments might help us to see a bridge across the deep-freeze chasm of the 1950s and ‘60s.