1Throughout the literature on the history of political ideas concerned with human rights, we find a certain segment of the Left—sometimes labeled “radical,” “revolutionary,” “extreme,” or even “left of the Left,” with the boundaries shifting depending on the perspective of the author  [1]—that is commonly linked to an “anti-human rights” critique.  [2] These authors tend to point to certain essays written by a young Karl Marx, in which he casts a double opprobrium upon the very foundations of the human rights project: firstly, based on a logic of individual emancipation, it is liable to disregard the collective dimension of capitalist exploitation; secondly, based on a logic of (illusory) political emancipation, it serves to obstruct (real) social emancipation, keeping the masses from realizing its necessity. Within Marxist thought, human rights are viewed with a suspicion that has to do with both a critique of “egoistic man separated from his fellow men and the community”  [3] and the classic opposition between economic base (the real relations of production) and ideological superstructure (formal rights and freedoms) engrained in the most orthodox forms of communism.  [4] Within the diverse traditions making up what we will call the “revolutionary Left,”  [5] the weight given to Marx’s arguments on this topic varies considerably. Nevertheless, a mistrust of the human rights agenda is often highlighted by scholars with very little discussion, as a generally accepted and self-evident fact, and is sometimes presented as an intrinsic quality of the Left as a whole.  [6] The implications of this are problematic and deserve a more nuanced analysis. In fact, as Éric Agrikoliansky observes, “the leftist discourse on rights cannot be described through any simple, linear model; it is a twisting, zigzagging, and sometimes contradictory course that must be traced.”  [7] Marxism itself is neither theoretically unified nor historically consistent on this point. Underlying Marx’s own work is a critique that is less trenchant than it might at first appear  [8] and that has been interpreted in wildly different ways throughout the twentieth century.  [9] Indeed, there have been cases where the language of human rights has been adopted by activists within the revolutionary Left who claim affiliation to some form of Marxism. This paper examines one such case from Argentina, starting from the premise that the history of political ideas would benefit from an exploration of the more microsocial interactions of activist groups. It will demonstrate that this nexus between human rights and the revolutionary Left is not necessarily antithetical but can in fact give rise to forms of activism that are temporally simultaneous and overlapping from a subjective and organizational point of view, as well as logics of discursive refraction in which positions are mediated by both the political arena and the space of human rights activism.

2The aim of this article is to contribute to a social science literature that has been developing rapidly since the end of the 1990s. This literature is structured around two main axes, each concerned with exploring the relations between human rights and dissent/affirmation vis-à-vis the social and political order. The first, a historical sociological analysis of the international scene, offers a critical reading of movements in support of human rights—the new lingua franca of global politics  [10]—by situating them within the broader processes through which imperial power structures have been reconfigured since the 1970s.  [11] The second is an intellectual history (emanating primarily from English-speaking countries), which will be the core focus of this article.  [12] One of the fundamental assumptions of this second category of work is the existence of a particular conceptualization of human rights, unique to our time, as a relatively autonomous intellectual system defined by the following characteristics: a predominantly moral, rather than political nature; wide currency in civil society that goes beyond official use in international legal settings; and the transnational quality of the social movements that have grown around it. This historiography has been greatly influenced by the work of Samuel Moyn, who traces the emergence of human rights as a fundamentally transnational and metapolitical project back to the 1970s, linking it to the emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International in Europe and North America, the consolidation of dissent in Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe, and the development of protest movements explicitly invoking the concept of human rights in South America.  [13] The kind of approach adopted by Moyn and his followers tends to rest on a zero-sum logic, a “pattern of political replacement,”  [14] whereby socialist and anti-colonialist utopias were displaced by a new moral utopia epitomized by the human rights agenda. Human rights as a concept is presented as an appropriately minimalist ideology for a skeptical age, come to fill the vacuum left by the radical political and social protest movements of the 1960s. Thus, according to this approach, humanitarian engagement became a substitute for a political engagement that had ended in disillusionment.

3This understanding of human rights is contested by sociologists including Yves Dezalay, Bryant Garth, and Nicolas Guilhot (see footnote 11), for whom the emergence of a “field” of human rights in the 1970s was instead a counterpart to the politicization of philanthropy. Its significance can also be discussed from an alternative point of view: the history of the construction of political ideas. The case study put forward in this article builds on this critique, offering a counterexample for challenging the theory of “replacement” in the intellectual history of human rights. Without making any criticism of the development of the NGO model for the defense of human rights, nor the emergence of an ideologico-discursive grammar that claims to exist outside of politics, capable of exerting its own independent effects, this article aims to take a different perspective, one that is both necessary and complementary. Its goal is to demonstrate that this kind of activism is no less steeped in (sometimes very radical) political logics, that these logics are expressed in multiple forms depending on the context studied, and that they must be accounted for if we are to understand this form of activism in all its ideological complexity. The analysis will draw on a case study of the Comisión Argentina de Derechos Humanos (CADHU) (Argentine Human Rights Commission), founded in Buenos Aires in 1976 and dissolved in 1983. The aim is to resituate this organization within the contested space in which positions on human rights were negotiated by the Argentinian Left at the time. There are several good reasons for focusing on this particular organization based halfway across the globe. First of all, post-1968 Argentina was the setting for the emergence of a particularly formidable type of armed leftist groups critical of both socialism and communism  [15] and embodied by organizations such as Montoneros  [16] or the PRT­ERP.  [17] Revolutionary violence was a basic fact of political life at the time when human rights was taking its first steps as an activist movement.  [18] Second, in Argentina the gap between the tactics of the revolutionary Left, with its heavy reliance on armed resistance, and the peaceable image usually associated with human rights activism was more conspicuous than elsewhere. The distance separating the two appears greater than is typically the case in less violent national contexts. Third, this choice is all the more apposite since, conversely, the contemporary discourse on human rights in Argentina has been strongly influenced by those who seek to lay claim to the revolutionary activism of the 1960s and 1970s. The persistence of this mindset is itself anomalous according to the dominant pattern identified by contemporary historiographers.  [19] Contrary to the image generally associated with humanitarian activism, the majority of Argentinian human rights activists were not “pacifists” in the sense of condemning the country’s history of revolutionary violence. Rather, this history has been the focus of intense debate and serves as an internal dividing line within the Argentinian Left.  [20] Finally, the decision to focus on CADHU is justified by the fact that it was one of the most vocal organizations in exposing the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Argentinian army in the 1970s and 1980s, and because its most prominent leaders, who would eventually take on governmental roles in the 2000s, subsequently distinguished themselves as spokespeople for a vision of human rights that claimed a direct link with the political action of the revolutionary activists of the 1960s and 1970s.  [21] In CADHU, then, we find all of the key elements that make Argentina such a fertile terrain for studying the links between the revolutionary Left (or even politics more generally) and human rights. It provides an instructive point of departure in light of its incongruity with the existing literature, and as we go deeper we discover an interplay of contradictions between actors and the habitual underlying tensions of this intellectual history—one that few authors opt to enrich with a localized analysis that pays close attention to the realities of activist praxis.

4This article is therefore based on an analysis that aims to discover in as much detail as possible the operational logics of an activist organization, in order to examine in a concrete sense the main premises of the intellectual history of human rights, as developed thus far. This microsocial approach allows us to reconstruct the points of convergence and hybridized edges that a top-down historical analysis is all too inclined to overlook. From an exploration of the dynamics behind CADHU’s activities, we will go on to discuss three of the problems raised by the replacement (or zero-sum) model that has been dominant until now:

51. The problem of chronology: the human rights movement is said to have been a successor to revolutionary forms of activism, emerging only after these more militant movements had entered their decline.

62. The problem of organization: human rights activism is presumed to be a distinct, self-contained activist sphere, free from the obligations imposed by traditional political organizations.

73. The problem of depoliticization, stemming from the way the notion of human rights has been taken up in activist discourse: to speak from a human-rights perspective is, supposedly, to renounce the maximalist revolutionary understanding of social and political transformation.

8Adopting this triple-problematic framing opens up three levels for examining and making sense of how political ideas translate into practice: the temporal, the subjective, and the discursive. If the struggle for human rights exists to some extent outside of politics (as Moyn has argued), a more localized study should help demonstrate that this process of secession from the political sphere is not linear, nor complete, nor uncontested. It is these sites of contestation—and how they have been interpreted by intellectual historians interested in the transmutation of ideologies and the emergence of (relatively) autonomous spheres of action—that this article seeks to elucidate from a historical perspective, while also developing a set of methodological tools with more general application. An inquiry into the activist dynamics of CADHU may also contribute to a richer debate, by offering a firmly grounded history of a set of political ideas that encourages us to embed a serious reflection on the activist reality into our approach to the intellectual reality.

Research sources

9The arguments presented in this article were developed in the course of a research program that formed the basis of a doctoral dissertation in political science. This dissertation, defended in 2017, focused on the political uses of human rights by the Argentinian Left from the 1970s to the 2000s. This work centered around a reconstruction of the activist trajectory of CADHU’s most prominent leaders, based on a mixed-method approach that drew on both archival sources and personal interviews. In terms of secondary sources, the data presented in this article were compiled from three distinct documentary categories: internal communications aimed at CADHU activists; individual correspondence between members of the organization; and newsletters and reports aimed at the general public.

10This material is scattered across a diverse array of archives, and so the location of each source is indicated in a footnote upon first mention. They include institutional archives (e.g., the Archivo Nacional de la Memoria [National Memory Archive] in Buenos Aires), NGO archives (e.g., the digital archives of El Topo Blindado [www.eltopoblindado.com] and Ruinas Digitales [www.ruinasdigitales.com]), and certain personal archives to which I was granted access over the course of my research.

CADHU in context

13CADHU was founded in Argentina in 1976, amid a rapidly escalating government crackdown on the most radical elements of the opposition. Its membership was composed primarily of lawyers with links to revolutionary groups and a seasoned history of defending political prisoners. This proximity marks CADHU out from other human rights groups operating in Argentina at the time, such as the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos (APDH) (Permanent Assembly for Human Rights), closely affiliated with the center-left, and the Liga Argentina por los Derechos del Hombre (LADH) (Argentine League for Human Rights), linked to the Partido Comunista de la Argentina (PCA) (Communist Party of Argentina).

14In the wake of the coup d’état of March 24, 1976, key figures within CADHU went into exile. Scattered across the world, their dispersal allowed them to establish a transnational network for exposing the dictatorship’s crimes. CADHU’s principal branches were run by Eduardo Luis Duhalde in Madrid, Rodolfo Mattarollo in Paris, and Carlos González Gartland in Mexico (see the biographical notes in the appendix). Between 1976 and 1983, CADHU released various reports and statements aimed at the international press and diplomatic circles in order to draw attention to the situation in Argentina.

15In 1983, as soon as the rule of law was restored, CADHU voluntarily dissolved and its activists returned from exile. They made contact with domestic organizations representing victims of government repression, formed under the shadow of the dictatorship (such as Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo). Most went on to pursue careers in journalism, while continuing to work with the small leftist organizations that were reforming.

16At the time when the idea of forming CADHU was beginning to take shape, toward the end of 1975, the main politico-military groups of the new Left were rapidly growing, although they were to be short-lived. Following a brief period of liberalization of political institutions in 1973, which led to a drop in activity among armed revolutionary groups, Argentinian democracy very quickly drifted toward authoritarianism. In response, Montoneros ramped up its armed propaganda campaign and expanded its military capacities, as reflected in the success of the guerrilla attack on an army barracks in the northern province of Formosa in October 1975.  [24] Meanwhile, the PRT­ERP also expanded rapidly after 1973, opening a rural guerrilla foco in Tucumán in 1974 and launching an energetic recruitment drive that would peak in 1975.  [25]

17As state repression intensified, the armed resistance grew. In 1974, a parapolice force was established and tasked with assassinating opponents. In February 1975, a state of siege was declared in Tucumán, rolled out across the entire country in September that year. The army was now in charge of maintaining civil order. The seizure of Argentina’s political institutions by the armed forces was not officially acknowledged until March 24, 1976, when a coup d’état was launched by a junta that brought together all three branches of the military. However, the dictatorship’s counterinsurgency measures, referred to as the “National Reorganization Process” (1976­1983), had already been in place for several months. This institutionalized repression took several forms, including the kidnapping of dissidents, their placement in one of 340 secret detention centers, and the torture and forced disappearance of thousands of people.  [26]

18CADHU’s roots can be traced back to the point of convergence between two dynamics: the rise of revolutionary activism and the escalation of the risks incurred by activists. It was also the product of a parallel but unfinished political project envisaged as a response to this conflicting scenario: the creation of an armed resistance drawn from across the revolutionary spectrum. Plans to join forces through what was dubbed the Organización para la Liberación de Argentina (OLA) (Organization for the Liberation of Argentina) occupied the attention of its various founding groups throughout the first half of 1976, both before and after the military coup.  [27] The momentum was lost in the aftermath of the assassination of the leader of the PRT­ERP on July 19, 1976, while he was traveling to a meeting with the Montoneros leadership in order to move forward with the OLA project.  [28]

19The timeline of CADHU’s creation and the composition of its leadership structures are to be understood in the context of this dynamic of convergence between revolutionary organizations that developed between late 1975 and mid-1976. The first meetings took place in February 1976,  [29] and a constituent assembly was held in July that year, during which the new organization’s statutes were approved.  [30] Its work was divided between a directorate based in Argentina and an international delegation. The make-up of this delegation reflects the spirit of mutual accommodation between revolutionary organizations that led to CADHU’s inception. Represented were members of the PRT­ERP (Martín Federico and Roberto Guevara, a brother of Che, who was swiftly replaced by Rodolfo Mattarollo), Montoneros (Lidia Massaferro), the Partido Revolucionario de los Obreros Argentinos (PROA, a small armed Marxist group) (Eduardo Luis Duhalde and Carlos González Gartland), and two independent lawyers, who had close links to revolutionary circles but who were unaffiliated with any particular group (Gustavo Roca and Lucio Garzón Maceda).  [31]

20CADHU’s connection with revolutionary groups was all the more inevitable since it was formed at a time when defending human rights was an activity steeped in political overtones. In his account of the foundation of CADHU, Carlos María Duhalde (brother of Eduardo Luis Duhalde) suggests that meetings with the leaders of two other bodies, the APDH and the LADH, had taken place some time previously. As an alliance agreement between the two could not be reached, the stage was set for the talks that gave rise to CADHU.  [32] It would have been surprising if it were otherwise: each of these organizations had close ties with rival parties within the opposition. The LADH was effectively an offshoot of the PCA, traditionally hostile to the new Left and keen to promote a very moderate form of opposition to the regime.  [33] The APDH, on the other hand, which brought together representatives from different religious denominations and legally authorized political parties at the time (primarily socialists, radicals, intransigents, communists, and Christian democrats), was known for its rejection of terrorism “of all stripes,” including “ultra-left-wing terrorism”  [34]—a catchall term for various armed revolutionary groups. From the very outset, then, the sympathizers of the new armed Left found themselves excluded from these two human rights groups. A new organization of their own, forged in this atmosphere of political division, was both a means of protecting revolutionary activists from state repression and a new vehicle for action that transposed the historical political rivalry between the center-left (close to the APDH), the communist Left (primarily affiliated with the LADH), and the new armed Left (linked to CADHU) into a new setting. These human rights groups worked in association with the party or parties instrumental to their formation: they were offshoots or even front organizations.

21The accounts gathered in the course of our research into CADHU contain many inconsistencies, but they all support the conclusion that the link with armed revolutionary groups was fundamental to the new organization. According to Manuel Gaggero, a member of the international delegation and CADHU’s representative in Nicaragua from 1979, “CADHU grew out of an agreement between Montoneros and the PRT, of which I had been an active member since 1974. We decided to include a number of ‘independents,’ like Gustavo Roca, Eduardo Luis Duhalde, and Carlos González Gartland, but it was led from inside those two organizations.”  [35] Other former CADHU members, such as Carlos González Gartland and Marcelo Duhalde, dispute this account, stating that the initiative originated within a small armed party, PROA, of which they were also members at that time. Thus, for Marcelo Duhalde, brother of Eduardo Luis, “CADHU was essentially PROA’s project.”  [36] According to Carlos González Gartland, from July 1976 onward, the point when CADHU’s senior leaders began to opt for exile, “most of those who stayed [in Argentina] were the same people behind PROA.”  [37] Although contradictory, these statements would appear to validate the hypothesis that CADHU was the product of a drive led from within revolutionary groups themselves, which incorporated a “human rights” dimension as part of their strategy of armed resistance. In fact, it was PROA members (Ignacio Ikonicoff, Liliana Galetti, and Haroldo Logiurato) who between mid-1976 and mid-1977 coordinated the domestic aspects of CADHU’s campaign to expose the dictatorship’s crimes. Together, they gathered information from other revolutionary organizations operating in Argentina and disseminated it around the globe.  [38] CADHU, therefore, was an offshoot of these armed groups; its foundation predated their physical eradication.

22In 1977, a report entitled Argentina. Proceso al genocidio was published first in Spain  [39] and then in several other European countries.  [40] It marked the end of this first phase, during which CADHU appeared to be a front organization for Argentina’s armed groups, designed to coordinate international condemnation of the repression visited on revolutionary activists. At the same time, these revolutionary organizations were dismantled and their activists hunted down and killed. By mid-1977, the largest of Argentina’s armed political groups, Montoneros and the PRT­ERP, were drawing up plans to get their most prominent leaders out of Argentina and focusing on building up their networks of exiles.  [41] As for PROA, the backbone of CADHU’s work in Argentina, almost all of its activists were assassinated in June 1977 following an army ambush.  [42] Thus, PROA was dissolved, and while both Montoneros and the PRT­ERP continued to operate through exile networks, the collapse of the revolutionary organizations was final. There then followed a restructuring of the channels used to expose the human rights abuses committed by the military regime.

23In January 1978, members of CADHU’s international delegation gathered to discuss the implications of the new set of power relations that had emerged in recent months. The minutes from this meeting reveal a desire on the part of its leaders that the organization should break away from armed political parties and other groups in favor of the use of force:

24

CADHU, despite its depleted state, despite the incontrovertible origins of its members, and despite the attacks of the military junta on the organization itself and on each and every one of its members, whom it deems to be “subversive agents,” has nonetheless managed to preserve, for the most part, a non-partisan and representative image that has allowed it to avoid being “labeled.”  [43]

25Here, CADHU’s non-partisan image is portrayed as a key factor in its effectiveness. Its members would seek to reinforce this image in a context where the support (but also the control) of armed organizations was becoming less helpful to them, given the crisis situation they were now facing. Indeed, the material support they were able to provide for the defense of activists facing persecution had been compromised, and they were suffering ongoing reputational damage due to their association with organizations classed as “terrorist” by the military junta. In response, CADHU members redoubled their efforts to portray a “presentable” image to their international contacts. As well as the effectiveness factor, there was also a partisan factor: with more and more dissidents being massacred in Argentina, some revolutionary groups proved more resilient than others, creating an imbalance. Montoneros, in particular, managed to sustain a disciplined structure in its early years in exile, and attempted to infiltrate the numerous solidarity groups that were springing up around the world (most notably in Spain, France, and Mexico).  [44] Faced with this internal rivalry, CADHU’s leaders, most of whom had once been members of other groups that had fared less well, distanced themselves from the interorganizational spirit of its foundation in favor of a tactical extra-partisan stance. Given the pronounced imbalance of power, this was no doubt perceived as the best option for keeping a lid on Montoneros’ hegemonic aspirations. CADHU’s departisanization was, paradoxically, the outcome of a partisan logic. As the drive for effectiveness and the partisan question converged, the stewardship of political organizations was called into question. It was at this moment that human rights began to take shape as a discrete activist space, a space of encounter not only for those from a partisan background, but also for legal professionals and intellectuals. The defense of human rights became an end in itself for CADHU activists, who were looking for a way to insulate the organization from outsiders who sought to use it to their own advantage:

26

Although CADHU counts various party representatives among its activists, it should not, and cannot, be a partisan organization. Once its objectives have been set and the limits to its action drawn, it must, never wavering from its defined path of denunciation and solidarity, move forward independently.  [45]

27Human rights advocacy, which emerged from the slipstream of revolutionary organizations, thus survived their physical dissolution (but did not stem from it). This process of restructuring, then, was not a sign of the intellectual collapse of the revolutionary project within CADHU, which by asserting its apartisanship was by no means claiming to be apolitical. Thus, in a letter from Eduardo Luis Duhalde to his “Mexican comrades,” written from Madrid at the time when these changes were taking place, he reaffirms his “understanding of the revolution and the struggle for socialism.”  [46] He calls on former PROA activists to “merge with the genuine, natural groups formed in exile, without dissolving as cells” and to “act in a coordinated manner [in keeping with] a revolutionary spirit and a shared ideological and political vision.”  [47] In this same letter, dated March 1978, Duhalde reiterates his avowed rejection of “reformist and social-democratic politics.”  [48] This ideological thread would remain unbroken throughout the organization’s history. Indeed, a few years later, in 1981, an internal CADHU report decried the “pacifism” of certain elements of the opposition, such as the APDH, in the following terms:

28

Never wavering, CADHU has held firm to its position, establishing a distinction between the terrorist activity of the state and the ruling classes and the legitimate activity of popular resistance to oppression, without being led astray by so-called “pacifists” who regard these two opposing realities as being one and the same, and condemn the people to inaction.  [49]

29The revolutionary tide left its mark on CADHU’s activism, with the organization becoming a kind of successor vehicle for politico-military groups once their inexorable decline became apparent. There was, then, no zero-sum game: the development of human rights as a political project was not necessarily predicated on the decline of the revolutionary Left’s “maximalist utopias” (to borrow Moyn’s term). On the contrary, the human rights project, forged in a primordial soup of militant activism, can be linked directly to the strategy of revolutionary groups. The two are bound together in a relationship of chronological simultaneity; they are the fruit of the same dynamic that human rights activism then helped preserve, at least in some partial form, as armed resistance groups were physically wiped out. The systematic consideration of the partisan affiliations of members of human rights groups is no minor footnote; it allows us to reconsider the temporality of the emergence of this form of activism by demonstrating that it was simultaneously intertwined with other forms of social action that the replacement model tends to overlook.

Conclusion

66The analysis presented in this article has allowed us to revisit certain assumptions that tend to determine our understanding of the relations between human rights activism and political activism, particularly on the left of the Left. Following the thread of activist experiences post- 1968, one often gets the impression that the transition from revolutionary activism to human rights activism took the form of a clean break, in conformance with a logic of replacement whereby one cause gave way to the other. However, if we study the circumstances in which CADHU was formed, we see that it is possible to take the view that the two phenomena were in fact simultaneous. This means that the very same actors could be instrumental in forming an organization dedicated to the defense of human rights while at the same time continuing to engage in direct action on behalf of groups seeking to bring about a socialist revolution. By studying the practical and subjective interconnections between these two spheres of action, we come to understand that they are best approached as overlapping, rather than parallel, movements. The reciprocal nature of the activism of CADHU and that of more revolutionary organizations is vital to grasp if we are to understand how the struggle against human rights violations was reconciled with a broader political strategy. Finally, there is a need to resituate the discourse on these violations within a framework that acknowledges the contours of the political divides that guided the actions of those who helped develop this discourse. In this way, different positions within the HRS begin to look like familiar political categories refracted through a new social space. Human rights, then, provided a vehicle for a certain kind of politics, but we would be mistaken to see this as pure and simple instrumentalization. Rather, what we find are two forms of activism inextricably intertwined through a triple logic of simultaneity (chronological), superimposition (subjective), and refraction (discursive). Since the human rights discourse was governed by political action, direct action in defense of these rights helped craft the shared understandings and vocabulary adopted by political actors operating in the space of convergence between these two practices. By no means, then, can it be claimed that the political appropriation of human rights was some covert and manipulative bid to stretch a concept beyond its true meaning; rather, it was a process of actively absorbing a new set of ideological coordinates through the filter of familiar political categories. Through this process, activists were able to transform these categories while simultaneously perpetuating them by other means.

67Here, the merits and limitations of a thematic approach to the human rights project that treats it as a self-contained whole (encapsulated to some extent in the phrase “human rights studies”) come to the fore. While recent historiography has helped highlight the novelty of the activist language that emerged toward the end of the post-1968 period, we must not overlook the extent to which the development of this new vocabulary was shaped by political factors. From this perspective, the human rights agenda was a continuation and a development of older forms of political action, but at the same time it helped modify the vocabulary and discursive strategies—in short, the narrativization—of an evolving revolutionary activism. The historiography of human rights can therefore serve as a starting point for understanding the processes of ideological hybridization at work in activist practices, as long as we can appreciate the (seemingly) external parameters of this historiography.

68The case of Argentina offers a counterexample that allows us to place the overarching theory established by Moyn, which links the emergence of human rights to a depoliticization of activism, into its proper perspective. Not only that, this approach also provides us with a more general set of methodological and heuristic tools for exploring the dynamics of the historical evolution of political ideas. By drawing on a wider variety of resources, it makes it possible to pursue an in-depth reconstruction of moments in history characterized by a particularly dense web of practices and discourses. These moments introduce us to actors engaged in a multitude of intertwining activities, embedded in diverse logics that are difficult to untangle but which, from a position of hindsight, we are often too inclined to try to split apart. This endeavor, a teleological one in a sense, fails to do justice to the (sometimes chronically) hybrid forms of activism that emerge in moments of ideological change. Our approach also allows us to take account of those subjective continuities mobilized by actors caught up in these currents of change. The perpetuation of older political identities within human rights activism, which prompts us to look critically at the autonomy of this emerging space, can therefore be understood as part of a wider effort to bring coherence to the various paths of different individuals and groups. Paying attention to these micro-strategies opens up an opportunity to approach a more nuanced understanding of the space of possibilities from which innovations in political ideas emerge, rather than the bluntness of a gaze that sees this process as a straightforward transition from one binary state to another.

69We can then piece together a contextualized history of ideas in the activist space, without confining ourselves to the more generic overviews that the sources most commonly associated with academic inquiry tend to propose. Drawing on the internal documentation of an organization such as CADHU, or on personal correspondence between activists that sheds light on the more “technical” or logistical aspects of their operations, gives us the keys to understand the conditions in which ideas are produced and formulated in public discourse, with due regard to the immediate historical context, the influence of political organizations, and the power relations between actors. In this way, we can unearth the traces of a completely distinctive ideological tradition: here, the human rights project as taken up by Argentina’s revolutionary Left. This was a simultaneously intellectual and activist project, in which ideas took on a particular form through their convergence with a practice of political engagement. By opening the “black box” of (human rights) activism, we can contribute to ongoing efforts to move beyond traditional methods for reconstructing the history of political ideas.