Ebook: Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights

Solidarity offers the first history of US-Latin American solidarity from the Haitian Revolution to the present day. Steve Striffler traces the history of internationalism through the Cold War, exploring the rise of human rights as the dominant current of international solidarity, before turning to the period after 1990 when the focus of solidarity shifted from human rights/peace to labour-related issues.

In a broad-ranging landscape defined by case studies, the book asks: how and why has solidarity changed over time? Why have particular strategies, tactics, and strands of internationalism emerged or re-emerged at particular moments? And how has solidarity shaped the history of the US left in particular?

Striffler argues that although a reorientation of solidarity occurred as the US labour movement began to embrace a progressive brand of internationalism, it has produced modest results, as it largely retained an organisational infrastructure inherited from the human rights movement. Additionally, very little of this solidarity has been channelled towards the most powerful response to neoliberalism in the Americas: the Latin American left.

Solidarity has largely been explored in an ahistorical context, and therefore this book provides a distinctive intervention in the history of progressive politics in both the US and Latin America, the past and present of US imperialism and anti-imperialism, and the history of human rights and labour internationalism.