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2 results

  • 3 - Political Imprisonment and Human Rights, 1945–1964

  • Tom Buchanan, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945–1977
    Published online:
    10 April 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2020, pp 81-103

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 looks at how far questions of human rights contributed to the campaigns against political imprisonment during the 1950s. The Cold War forms the inescapable context: the left campaigned for left-wing prisoners, and the right for right-wing prisoners. Peter Benenson challenged this binary distinction when he set up the cross-party lawyers’ organisation Justice in 1956. The chapter discusses Benenson’s early career, as well as that of Eric Baker, who would work closely with him in Amnesty. The two men first worked together in Cyprus during the Emergency of 1955-1959. Baker’s Quaker heritage is explored, as well as his support for the influential Italian social activist Danilo Dolci. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various campaigns that were launched in the late 1950s and early 1960s for an amnesty for political prisoners in Spain, Portugal and Greece. These were essentially left-wing campaigns, but it is argued that they had much in common with later ‘human rights‘ campaigns and are worthy of serious study.

  • Italian-American conversations on the mafia: Danilo Dolci visits Philadelphia’s 1961 Festival of Italy

  • Samantha Owen
  • Journal:
    Modern Italy / Volume 22 / Issue 4 / November 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    20 September 2017, pp. 419-433
    Print publication:
    November 2017

  • In 1961 the peace activist and anti-mafia campaigner Danilo Dolci spoke at a protest event at the Italian centennial of unification celebrations hosted by the City of Philadelphia. The reactions to the talk he gave on development initiatives in Western Sicily provide some insight into the transnational discussion that was developing around the mafia, governance and leadership in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dolci and his supporters made the suggestion that the problems encountered by the post-war governments in Italy, Sicily and Philadelphia were a result of leaderships which presented or made the appearance of change but did not fix the underlying problems. This article maps how the conversation developed, why the idea of the mafia as a ‘thing’, an operating criminal organisation with Sicilian origins, was such an important narrative, and what it meant for those trying to make a claim to leadership positions.