The first chapter deals with McNamara and the success of this project in overseas arenas. I think you’ll love it!

Take a read for yourself! (🧵/11) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"Ultimately, the Friends’ innovation and legacy in human rights work are its protection-based advocacy and its coalitional politics that make it worth studying from the perspective of scholarship on transnational social movements."(🧵/10)

As I write, "In the context of the explosion of grassroots human rights activity and work in the 1970s and 1980s, the Friends brief tenure and limited impact was not unusual. The more famous and long-lasting groups, such as Amnesty and eventually @hrw.org are the anomalies."(🧵/9)

It's a hard searched for story of one of the many, smaller human rights groups that arose in response to the massive violations taking place during the period of Argentine state terror, albeit with a short lifespan. (🧵/8)

What came out of this journey is finally in published form and I'm thrilled to see this in print. "Protection-based advocacy: assessing the United States Friends of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo." (🧵/7) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

And we called archives we couldn't visit from all over the country and many were generous enough in the immediately post-Covid/archives reopening phase to send us scanned files as well. (🧵/6) {Shout out to amazing archivists--truly the best people!}

we visited archives all over the northeast looking for needles in the haystacks. We researched any member of the group's personal papers, public documents, memoirs. We tried to interview any surviving members of the Friends- sometimes successful, sometimes in vain. (🧵/5)

And after that, well, I knew I had to do more research on this group and see if anything was there. I invited that student to accompany me on the journey and learn about archival research. Over the next year and a half...(🧵/4)

That summer, I was in the Ford Foundation archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center, doing research for an unrelated project, and found a series of documents about the group's founding! (🧵/3)

After some more of my own searches, I still didn't find anything. The student went on to write a great capstone paper on the US government & the Madres, and I all but forgot about the group until...(🧵/2)

And even though my own current book project doesn't cover Brazil, I was fun to use some research from my own archival visits (the review starts with this survey from 1968).

“The government has crossed a symbolic line by appropriating a slogan tied to memory and human rights,” critics from opposition sectors stated.