9780801472510-0801472512-Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International

Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International

ISBN-13: 9780801472510
ISBN-10: 0801472512
Edition: Annotated
Author: Stephen Hopgood
Publication date: 2006
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Format: Paperback 272 pages
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Book details

ISBN-13: 9780801472510
ISBN-10: 0801472512
Edition: Annotated
Author: Stephen Hopgood
Publication date: 2006
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Format: Paperback 272 pages

Summary

Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (ISBN-13: 9780801472510 and ISBN-10: 0801472512), written by authors Stephen Hopgood, was published by Cornell University Press in 2006. With an overall rating of 3.5 stars, it's a notable title among other Nonprofit Organizations & Charities (Small Business & Entrepreneurship, Human Rights, Constitutional Law, Political Science, Politics & Government) books. You can easily purchase or rent Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Paperback) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used Nonprofit Organizations & Charities books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $0.43.

Description

"If one organization is synonymous with keeping hope alive, even as a faint glimmer in the darkness of a prison, it is Amnesty International. Amnesty has been the light, and that light was truth―bearing witness to suffering hidden from the eyes of the world."―from the Preface

The first in-depth look at working life inside a major human rights organization, Keepers of the Flame charts the history of Amnesty International and the development of its nerve center, the International Secretariat, over forty-five years. Through interviews with staff members, archival research, and unprecedented access to Amnesty International's internal meetings, Stephen Hopgood provides an engrossing and enlightening account of day-to-day operations within the organization, larger decisions about the nature of its mission, and struggles over the implementation of that mission.

An enduring feature of Amnesty's inner life, Hopgood finds, has been a recurrent struggle between the "keepers of the flame" who seek to preserve Amnesty's accumulated store of moral authority and reformers who hope to change, modernize, and use that moral authority in ways that its protectors fear may erode the organization's uniqueness. He also explores how this concept of moral authority affects the working lives of the servants of such an ideal and the ways in which it can undermine an institution's political authority over time. Hopgood argues that human-rights activism is a social practice best understood as a secular religion where internal conflict between sacred and profane―the mission and the practicalities of everyday operations―are both unavoidable and necessary. Keepers of the Flame is vital reading for anyone interested in Amnesty International, its accomplishments, agonies, obligations, fears, opportunities, and challenges―or, more broadly, in how humanitarian organizations accommodate the moral passions that energize volunteers and professional staff alike.

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