Abstract

Small human rights groups working in repressive countries undertake a daunting task. Facing a violent, often unpredictable government, activists in these groups listen to the victims of state terror and then criticize the state, domestically and internationally, for failing to respect the fundamental rights guaranteed to all human beings in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. State terror is as old as states, whereas "human rights" is an idea that has existed for only a few hundred years. The international agreements and institutions embodying human rights are younger yet: the Universal Declaration will turn fifty next year. Why would activists choose a new idea to confront an old problem? ;Framed in comparative terms, the question becomes: why do activists in some repressive countries found domestically-focused human rights organizations while activists in other repressive countries do not? By drawing on the history of liberalism and international human rights, sociological literature about the social origins of rights, and analyses of social movements and state terror, this dissertation proposes a general theory of the emergence of national human rights movements. State violence and national liberal traditions are proposed as the causal bases of human rights groups' formation. ;The analysis begins with a quantitative analysis of 100 countries world-wide. The quantitative work is complemented by three comparative case studies of El Salvador, Pakistan, and Ethiopia, representing high, medium, and low levels of human rights organizing, respectively. The study concludes with considerable evidence that both proposed factors do have significant effects, although the explanation is more complicated than originally proposed. State violence committed openly by agents of the state greatly inhibits the formation of human rights groups, whereas the clandestine use of violence by the state heightens state hypocrisy and can increase human rights groups' effectiveness. The age and strength of constitutional guarantees does explain differing levels of human rights organizing in Latin America, but does not adequately measure the liberal tradition elsewhere. Common law practices from the British colonial experience are a non-constitutional source of tactical space for human rights organizing