To Fight Soviet Agents in the Fatherland: Anti-Communism in Ayacucho's APRA, 1945-48
This article considers the anti-Communist words and actions of Ayacucho Peru’s APRA party during the 1945-1948 presidency of Jose Luis Bustamante y Rivero. Anti-Communism – understood here as opposition to the Peruvian Communist Party, its ideology, and its members – gave Apristas purpose, relevance and definition during the earliest moments of the global Cold War. By tracing the local motivations, practices and consequences of Aprista anti-Communism, a picture of sharp political animosity characterized by pointed rhetoric and steady, if low-level, political violence emerges.
Developing selves: photography, Cold War science and ‘backwards’ people in the Peruvian Andes, 1951–1966
This article explores how social science applications of photography employed in the early 1950s to both understand and change so-called ‘backwards’ people became entangled with, and drew momentum from, the geopolitical concerns of the early Cold War. Specifically, I address the employment of photography in the Cornell-Peru Project in the Andean community of Vicos, a decade-long research experiment combining development anthropology and fashionable modernisation theory emanating out of the behavioural sciences. In addition to development activities that were to serve as the catalysts of change (agricultural improvement, health and education), researchers at Vicos were at pains to uncover and validate the inner ‘predispositions’ towards change and modernity they hoped were lurking inside villagers. Reflecting Cold War priorities and concerns, researchers sought to locate a particular developing indigenous subject – one closer to liberal capitalism (and its values of self-reliance and individualism) and away from communal nature of indigenous society that too strongly resembled Soviet models of development and collectivisation. Along with an arsenal of other psychological projective tests, researchers hoped the camera’s lens would reveal this change through such subtle cues as the rearrangement of home interiors and modifications in dress, style and comportment, as well as the development of visual literacy. Following the photographic work of famed photographer and formative visual anthropologist, John Collier, Jr., during a year at Vicos, this article ultimately explores the limitations of the behavioural sciences’ hopeful uses of photography.
Human Rights Obligations and Transnational Corporations: The Limits of Direct Corporate Responsibility
To date, multinational corporations have had no direct human rights obligations under international law. Nonetheless, international lawyers can no longer ignore the increasing role of non-state actors in international society. This article suggests analysing existing mechanisms and new proposals for enhancing the accountability of transnational corporations, grouped into those focusing on the responsibility of the home and host states and those centred on the imposition of direct obligations on corporations. This article will specifically draw attention to the limits of some of the suggested normative changes, from a legal-theoretical perspective and in terms of their capacity to address effectively the challenges of the lack of respect for human rights laws.