Constituencies of Compassion:the Politics of Human Rights and Consumerism

Abstract

From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is standard for film actors and rock stars to lend their fame to human rights campaigns on behalf of Ugandan child soldiers, Afghan women, Tibetan exiles, or Haitian earthquake victims. Celebrities can be useful spokespersons in terms of their capacity to raise awareness and money because of the way in which the audience perceives these familiar faces and voices. This familiarity allows for unfamiliar and distant global issues to be brought into focus. Famous figures even understand humanitarian engagement as a useful and necessary component of their public image. As goodwill ambassadors, telethon phone bank operators, and editorial contributors, popular cultural figures have come to occupy a central position in human rights and humanitarian campaigns—especially with respect to communicating a message to the uninformed and unconcerned spectator. The potential for popular culture to provide a platform for ordinary people to become aware of and involved in human rights is, at first glance, a decidedly positive feature of the contemporary landscape. If scholars and activists take seriously the desire to inculcate a “human rights culture,” the ability to reach out to new communities of supporters is essential. And in the 1980s, the human rights community did precisely that by developing a series of advocacy tactics that set the movement on a course for mass appeal and originating a strategy that thrives still today.