Rights and Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua's Sandinista Movement

The victory of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 opened up a major new battleground in the Cold War between east and west. That larger conflict caused many to ignore or misjudge the domestic battle for democratic rights carried out by ordinary Nicaraguans, first against the Somoza dictatorship, and then against the Frente Sandinista, which led the Revolution. In Rights and Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua's Sandinista Movement, political scientist and legal scholar Stephen F. Diamond examines the conflict inside Nicaragua from a viewpoint that is critical of the FSLN, which was allied closely with Cuba and the Soviet Union, and of the United States, which formed a proxy army to overthrow the FSLN regime. Such an independent viewpoint yields important and original insights into the complex relationship between authoritarianism and democracy in the developing world.

Stephen F. Diamond is Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University's School of Law. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of London (Birkbeck College), his J.D. from Yale Law School and his B.A. in Development Studies from U.C. Berkeley. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and a visiting scholar at Harvard, Stanford and U.C. San Diego. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He is the author of From "Che" to China: Labor and Authoritarianism in the New Global Economy (Vandeplas 2009) and co-editor with Lance Compa of Human Rights, Labor Rights and International Trade: Law and Policy Perspectives (University of Pennsylvania 1996 and 2003).