The Material Culture of Human Rights. Consumer Products, Boycotts and the Transformation of Human Rights Activism in the 1970s and 1980s

During the 1960s and 1970s, human rights NGOs began to use boycotts and other consumer protests to draw attention to their campaigns. The Anti-Apartheid Movement in particular, used consumer products and spaces of consumption for their campaigns against the South African regime. By focussing on the everyday practice of consumption, these campaigns helped to translate human rights discourse from the sphere of international law and politics into the sphere of civil society and everyday life. The entanglement of human rights activism and consumer culture can thus be seen as an important – but so far mostly overlooked – aspect of the so-called “breakthrough” of human rights discourse in the 1970s. The article looks at this development from a material culture studies approach. It argues that everyday objects played an important role in human rights campaigns, particularly in the context of a mediatization and popularization of human rights in the 1970s and 1980s. The article takes the Anti-Apartheid Movement as a case study. By looking at the boycott campaigns as well as the consumer items the movement began to produce itself in the late 1980s, it shows how material objects and social practices became inextricably intertwined in these campaigns.