The histories of human rights and solidarity have become burgeoning fields of scholarly enquiry in recent years. Rooted in the global/transnational historiographical turn, they provide windows through which to examine networks that existed between peoples around the world and the ideas – such as human rights – that they helped to instil at a global level. It is no surprise that much of the new scholarship on human rights and solidarity has focused on the Cold War era either. If not exclusively products of the Cold War, both phenomena were intricately linked to the way in which that conflict unfolded, and in turn, both fed into the way it played out during the latter half of the twentieth century. As civil wars, revolutionary insurgencies and state-led violence engulfed societies, the cause of human rights grew more urgent and visible. Ideological affinities and shared ideals (whether real or imagined) also led people to join in the cause of solidarity either with those fighting for revolutionary change or those suffering the effects of hostility and repression.

Latin America stood at the heart of many new solidarity networks and human rights campaigns during the Cold War period. As Jessica Stites Mor's edited volume, Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America, so ably demonstrates, solidarity and human rights tied people in the region not only to other parts of the world and vice versa, but also to others within the region itself. Comprised of nine chapters and an introductory essay by Stites Mor, the book takes us from Latin American solidarity with Puerto Rican nationalists to transnational student protests in 1968 and the solidarity campaign with Chile, from Salvadorean refugees and international aid in Honduras to Brazil's gay liberation movement. There is also a chapter on the way in which Latin Americans viewed US involvement in Latin America in the context of Nelson Rockefeller's 1969 visit to the region (not exclusively negatively, as it turns out), and a chapter on the Latin American literary boom in the 1960s. The overall purpose of the book is to offer a history of solidarity and human rights from below: to examine grassroots perspectives and showcase examples of South–South cooperation. It therefore focuses on what Stites Mor calls the ‘key contributions’ that ‘community organizers, party members, intellectuals, novelists, priests, students, artists, urban pobladores, refugees, migrants, and common people’ made to the ‘the growth of new visions of political community and human rights in participatory democracy’ (p. 5).

In exploring these different perspectives, the book's contributors believe that solidarity and collective activism during the Cold War had an inherent value. They also draw connections and explore the practicalities of collaboration in new and significant ways. Margaret Power's examination of how Puerto Rican nationalism was perceived across Latin America is particularly valuable. As well as persuasively integrating Puerto Rico into histories of the Cold War in the Americas, she demonstrates what solidarity with Puerto Rico concretely achieved when it came to saving lives, freeing prisoners and challenging US hegemony. Brenda Elsey's chapter on the campaign for solidarity with Chile also does a very good job in examining how ‘popular culture became a subject of struggle between Pinochet and solidarity activists’. As she ably illustrates, activists used popular culture to fight ‘against the inculcation of values promoted by the regime through inventions of culture’ and as ‘a creative space for activists to promote new political agendas, such as women's rights’ (p. 180). Molly Todd's study of the ‘Politics of Refuge’ is another highlight of the volume. In examining the way in which Salvadorean exiles in Honduras during the 1980s imagined and constructed an identity for themselves through organisation and collective action, she sheds light on how local groups perceived their position in global politics.

Admittedly, some of the book's contributors romanticise the role of non-state actors. Despite the volume's title, the story of human rights does not receive as much attention as solidarity and remains an amorphous concept by association rather than a subject of detailed analysis. There is also a lack of engagement in many of the chapters with the political and ideological dimensions of solidarity in Latin America, as well as the power structures within which solidarity campaigns operated. This is problematic for grasping the ultimate aims and impact of the solidarity campaigns, especially in the case of Chile. Indeed, overall, enthusiasm for describing different forms of collaboration also overshadows the intended story of how this collaboration changed notions of political community, human rights or democracy.

Even so, some of the chapters do an excellent job at challenging assumptions and looking at the complexities that lay beneath grassroots activism. By exploring the relationship between those offering solidarity and those receiving it, for example, James Green's and Christine Hatzky's chapters illustrate the tensions that arose between people of very different backgrounds, cultures and political contexts. Green throws a spotlight on the homophobia of the Chilean far Left, while Hatzky's examination of Cuban volunteers in Angola reveals that Cubans and Angolans ‘remained strangers to each other during the sixteen years of transatlantic cooperation’ (p. 165). In the context of a fashionable rush to chart transnational and cultural encounters during the Cold War, these findings encourage us to approach the story of transnational networks, solidarity and human rights activism with critical awareness and a keener sense of their heterogeneity.

In many respects, in fact, this is an edited volume that signals the take-off of a historical field and a starting point for further research. It shows what can be done and what has been done so far. But it also demonstrates how much there is still to understand and explore. It is a must-read for anyone considering research on solidarity during the Cold War and will serve as a springboard for future work. As Stites Mor notes, the volume ‘pleads for … a sustained conversation about the nature and challenge of the transnational in Latin American Cold War history’ (p. 15). With this volume, that conversation has begun, and I for one look forward to seeing how it develops.