Mobilising human rights in Poland | War Memory as Cold War Battleground

Mobilising human rights in Poland—can we use the past to explain the present?

by Agnieszka Kubal, Associate Professor, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL

The springboard for this project is a seemingly banal observation: despite having joined the European Convention on Human Rights relatively recently, Poland has always been in the top five in terms of the number of applications submitted to the European Court of Human Rights every year. What explains this upsurge in human rights mobilisation? Can the answer be found in the past? In other words, is there a link between the historical collective experience of totalitarianism in the 20th century and the tendency to frame one's injustices as a human rights issue?

This fellowship is part of a larger book project that aims to investigate the everyday experiences of human rights mobilization from Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia, entitled Who are the humans behind Human Rights? Historical and comparative perspectives from Eastern Europe and Russia. The presentation at the Archivum will focus in particular on uncovering the historical roots of human rights activism in Poland, drawing on the research archives of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the dissident movement. By embracing the plurality of voices and perspectives, it will open the human rights discourse to contestation, conflict, and disjuncture.

War Memory as Cold War Battleground: U.S.-Soviet Narratives and Interventions

by Jonathan Brunstedt, Associate Professor of History, Texas A&M University

How do narratives of military victory shape a nation’s identity and perceived role in the world? How do such victory narratives fuel interventionist foreign policies? Finally, how do political cultures rooted in myths and memories of military triumph respond to the realities of defeat and humiliation in war? This project addresses these questions, focusing on how the United States and Soviet Union projected triumphalist narratives of victory in 1945 to forge ideological justifications for Cold War foreign policies and interventions. At the same time, it explores how traumatic defeats—in Vietnam and Afghanistan—profoundly impacted these rival “cultures of victory.” The presentation will highlight the war narratives embedded in various materials from the Blinken OSA Archivum, including Soviet and Western print media and Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe research reports.