Exporting Amnesty International to the United States: Transatlantic Human Rights Activism in the 1960s

This article analyzes Amnesty International's initial struggle to establish an American section. Amid the growing attention to Amnesty International in the scholarly literature, limited work exists on its national sections, including AIUSA, the American section. Understanding transatlantic disagreements about the efficacy of individual letter writing, funding, and the selection of prisoners of conscience illuminates the transferability of the Amnesty International model to the United States, the character of American human rights activism, and transatlantic relations among Amnesty's nongovernmental actors. Furthermore, the strained relationship between Amnesty International and AIUSA reveals different conceptions of nongovernmental activism in the 1960s.