Research
Books
William Michael Schmidli, Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and US Interventionism in the Late Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022).
“A groundbreaking book on Latin American human rights during the Reagan era. ”
Winner of the William M. LeoGrande Prize
for the best book on US-Latin American relations
William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy Toward Argentina (Cornell University Press, 2012).
One of the three “Best Books of 2013 on the Western Hemisphere.”
—Foreign Affairs
“…the best bilateral study we have of US policy toward a South American country during the Jimmy Carter administration.”
Edited Books
This book posits that democracy promotion played a key role in the Reagan administration’s Cold War foreign policy. It analyzes the democracy initiatives launched under Reagan and the role of administration officials, neoconservatives and non-state actors, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), in shaping a new model of democracy promotion, characterized by aid to foreign political movements and the spread of neoliberal economics.
The book discusses the ideological, strategic and organizational aspects of U.S. democracy promotion in the 1980s, then analyzes case studies of democracy promotion in the Soviet bloc and in U.S.-allied dictatorships in Latin America and East Asia, and, finally, reflects on the legacy of Reagan’s democracy promotion and its influence on Clinton, Bush and Obama. Based on new research and archival documents, this book shows that the development of democracy promotion under Reagan laid the foundations for US post-Cold War foreign policy.
Articles
W. M. Schmidli, “Rockin’ to Free the World?: Amnesty International’s Benefit Concert Tours, 1986-88” Diplomatic History, Volume 45, Issue 4, September 2021, 688–713.
Poster from the “Human Rights Now!” concert series, 1988, Amnesty International Poster Collection - C Amsterdam), International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, VC.
W. M. Schmidli, “‘The Most Sophisticated Intervention We Have Seen’:The Carter Administration and the Nicaraguan Crisis, 1978-1979,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 23, Issue 1 (2012), 66-86.
W. M. Schmidli, “Human Rights and the Cold War: the Campaign to Halt the Argentine Dirty War,” Cold War History, Vol 12, No 2 (May 2012), 345-365.
W. M. Schmidli, “Institutionalizing Human Rights in United States Foreign Policy: U.S.-Argentine Relations, 1976-1980,” Diplomatic History Vol. 35, No. 2 (April 2011), 351-377.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
W. M. Schmidli, “Human Rights: Norms and Practices,” in World History for International Studies, Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Anne Marieke van der Wal, eds. (Leiden University Press), 215-232.
W. M. Schmidli, “Recreating the Cold War Consensus: Democracy Promotion and the Crisis of American Hegemony,” in Robert Pee and William Michael Schmidli, The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 75-92.
W. M. Schmidli, “Reagan’s Project Democracy and the U.S. Intervention in Nicaragua,” in Jonathan Hunt and Simon Miles, eds., The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021), 237-259.
W. M. Schmidli, “Robert C. Hill and the Cold War in Latin America” in Diplomats at War: The American Experience (Martin Nijhoff Press, 2013), 265-283.
Reviews
Review of Andrew Hunt, We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), Diplomatic History, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhac053, 2022.
Review of Petra Goedde, The Politics of Peace: A Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019), Cold War History, vol. 20, no. 4 (2020), 521-523.
Review of Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016), The American Historical Review (June 2017), 870-871.
Review of Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2014), The American Historical Review, (February 2015), 296-297.
Review of Akira Irye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford University Press, 2012), Human Rights Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (March 2013), 63-65.
Review of Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed. Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Geschichte.Transnational, May 2012.
Review of Natasha Zaretsky, “Restraint of Retreat? The Debate over the Panama Canal Treaties and U.S. Nationalism after Vietnam,” H-Diplo, July 2011.
Review of Teishan A. Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), H-Diplo, October 2021.
Review of Sarah B. Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018), Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring 2019), 197-199.
Review of Robert Hutchings and Jeremi Suri, eds., Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (Oxford University Press, 2015), Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review, vol. 47, No. 1, April 2016, 30-33.
Review of Jessica Stites Mor, ed. Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), H-Diplo Roundtable, April 2014.
Review of Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), H-Diplo Roundtable, September 2012.
Review of Stephen G. Rabe The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2010), Reviews in American History 40 (2012) 332-338.
Review of Fred Rosen, ed., Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America (Duke University Press, 2008), H-Diplo, January 2009.