Keepers of the Flame by Stephen Hopgood

Keepers of the Flame by Stephen Hopgood

Hopgood has done the organization, the global human rights movement, and other stakeholders and important service by getting inside Amnesty and revealing its internal cultureFor movement insiders, Hopgood's book provides... insight into what holds the movement together as well as what tends to divide it. For outsiders, his book offers a penetrating portrait of an improbably but indispensable organization.

Hopgood spent a year in Amnesty's International London headquarters, the International Secretariat, interviewing staff and researching the inevitable bureaucratic and philosophical challenges facing the well-known humanitarian organization. This is an interesting, ambitious, and lucid critique of the International Secretariat.

Hopgood's unique study of Amnesty International is a welcome contribution from a political scientist with anthropological instincts, and it is likely to become a classic in the field. Hopgood immersed himself for over a year in Amnesty's culture, rituals, and politics, and then interpreted this data with insights from Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu. He writes clearly and well, and his interpretations should appeal to students of transnational organizing, human rights, and international affairs, broadly conceived.... For students of international organizations, one of the book's most intriguing elements is the author's representation of the Amnesty employee experience.... As Hopgood's book makes abundantly clear, it is devilishly difficult to build a representative, transnational movement for justice, even with the best of intentions.

Stephen Hopgood is Professor of International Relations, SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International, also from Cornell, and American Foreign Environmental Policy and the Power of the State.