Contested Icons: “Dissidents,” “Prisoners of Conscience,” and the Global Human Rights Imagination of the 1970s

Conventionally, the emergence of an international human rights language is seen as direct response to repression in the world. “The appeal to human rights,” Jürgen Habermas says, “feeds off the outrage of the humiliated at the violation of their human dignity.” Historical research, however, has shown that human rights discourse could be quite selective in which incidents of repression it highlighted internationally. The meanings of human rights, it turned out, were negotiated between victims and international supporters. The paper focuses on this aspect, by discussing two symbolic figures of the human rights imagination of the 1970s: the “prisoner of conscience” and the “dissident”. I shall argue that both can be seen in analogy to byzantine “icons”: just as a byzantine icon was not admired for the individual genius of the painter, but for how it brought the faithful in contact with the sacred, these two figures, too, were not meant to explain the intricacies of individual cases of repression, but to condense core values of human rights and thus bring the “faithful” in contact with the sacred core of human rights. Focusing on cases from Poland and the Soviet Union, the paper closes by underscoring the ambiguity of this iconization—it depoliticized resistance in the Soviet bloc, dissolving the specific political goals of oppositionists into a universalizing narrative, but it also empowered oppositionists to confront their governments and call upon the international community for help.