“Rhetoric and Reality” Revisited
“Rhetoric and Reality” Revisited
复制标题
重温“言辞与现实”
DOI：
10.1080/14754835.2012.702023
复制
发表时间：
2012
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
David L. Richards
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
David L. Richards
人们不需要费力地进行一场冗长的基础主义辩论，就能理解人权的概念与国际法之间存在着长期的关系。学者、政策制定者和活动家都在思考和辩论这种关系的本质是什么，应该是什么，而大卫·福赛斯的声音是对这些问题最重要的声音之一。自1971年以来，他关于外交政策和国际组织的学术著作一直在蓬勃发展，国际法不是背景，而是氧气。这篇文章并不试图代表大卫的福赛斯在这些领域的学术研究的一生的全部弧，因为，事实上，他的大部分工作已经以这样或那样的方式通知国际法。相反，我关注的是他在1980年发表在《世界人权》杂志（现称为《人权季刊》）上的文章《美国外交政策与人权：修辞与现实》中提出的政治教训。我认为这篇文章值得重新审视，因为它考察国际法与基于人权的美国外交政策之间关系的框架以及它所揭示的教训在这么多年后仍然引起共鸣。此外，这篇文章本身具有历史重要性，因为虽然定性，但它有助于为未来十五年的定量研究浪潮奠定基础，这些研究审查了美国总统的人权记录，无论是单独的还是相互之间的（参见Stohl，Carleton和约翰逊（1984）; Carleton和Stohl（1985）; Cingranelli和Pasquarello（1985）; McCormick和Mitchell（1988）; Poe（1991，1992）; Poe and Mr. Sangsi 1994）。
One need not wade through a boggy foundationalist debate to appreciate that the idea of human rights has a now long-standing relationship with international law. Scholars, policymakers, and activists muse and debate about both what is, and what should be, the nature of this relationship, and David Forsythe’s voice has been among the most important to have weighed in on these issues. International law has been not the backdrop but, rather, the oxygen on which his scholarly work about foreign policy and international organizations has flourished since 1971. This article does not attempt to represent the full arc of David’s Forsythe’s lifetime of scholarly inquiry in these areas as, indeed, much of his work has been informed in one way or another by international law. Rather, I focus on the political lessons presented in his article “American Foreign Policy and Human Rights: Rhetoric and Reality,” published in 1980 in the journal Universal Human Rights (now known as Human Rights Quarterly). I think this article deserves a second look, as both its framework for examining the relationship between international law and human rights-based US foreign policy and the lessons it uncovered thereby still resonate these many years later. Furthermore, this article carries historical importance of its own as, while qualitative, it helped set the table for a wave of quantitative studies over the next decade and a half that examined the human rights records of US presidents, both alone and in relation to one another (see Stohl, Carleton, and Johnson 1984; Carleton and Stohl 1985; Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; McCormick and Mitchell 1988; Poe 1991, 1992; Poe and Sirirangsi 1994).