Christian Peterson – författare

Globalizing Human Rights explores the complexities of the role human rights played in U.S.-Soviet relations during the 1970s and 1980s. It will show how private citizens exploited the larger effects of contemporary globalization and the language of the Final Act to enlist the U.S. government in a global campaign against Soviet/Eastern European human rights violations. A careful examination of this development shows the limitations of existing literature on the Reagan and Carter administrations’ efforts to promote internal reform in USSR. It also reveals how the Carter administration and private citizens, not Western European governments, played the most important role in making the issue of human rights a fundamental aspect of Cold War competition. Even more important, it illustrates how each administration made the support of non-governmental human rights activities an integral element of its overall approach to weakening the international appeal of the USSR.In addition to looking at the behavior of the U.S. government, this work also highlights the limitations of arguments that focus on the inherent weakness of Soviet dissent during the early to mid 1980s. In the case of the USSR, it devotes considerable attention to why Soviet leaders failed to revive the international reputation of their multinational empire in face of consistent human rights critiques. It also documents the crucial role that private citizens played in shaping Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform Soviet-style socialism.

The emergence of social complexity is at the heart of archaeological inquiry, but to date, there has been insufficient global comparative analysis of this phenomenon. This volume offers archaeologists and other social scientists reconstructions of past societies in all parts of the world, some of which challenge currently popular accounts. Using recently developed analytical approaches robust enough to yield compatible results from disparate datasets, the reconstructions presented here rest on fresh comparative analysis of archaeological data from 57 regions. They reveal the highly varied pathways to social complexity in ways that make it possible to see previously conflicting ideas as complementary. The analytical approaches and the full datasets are presented in detail in the book as well as an online data base. Offering new insights into the forces that have shaped human societies for millennia, this study provides a deeper understanding of the ways in which archaeology uses the material remains of past societies to reconstruct how they were organized.