In the past decade, works by Barbara Keys, Sarah Snyder, and Samuel Moyn, among others, have shown how human rights took center stage in American foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, due largely to the advocacy of transnational social movements. Despite entering a crowded field, Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power treads new ground. Rather than focus on the activities of well-known groups like Amnesty International, which organized publicity campaigns to ostracize foreign dictators, Walker is more concerned with how grassroots activists employed the language of human rights to question the core tenets of U.S. Cold War policies.Interested in "the multiple meanings and objectives of human rights diplomacy," Walker approaches human rights activism from a different angle. ( 5) Rather than looking at the grievous acts of foreign dictators, Walker's activists focused their attention on culprits closer to home. These activists refused to turn a blind eye to the role U.S. interventionism played in exacerbating human rights violations and the diminution of democracy. In fact, Walker suggests that the positive reception that human rights activists received in Congress stemmed from a shared desire to not only curb human rights abuses but also weaken the presidency and return war-making and other powers to the legislature to ensure democracy's survival.The collaboration between activists and policymakers that Walker sees as central to the development of human rights policies in the 1970s is most evident in Congress. As chair of the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Congressman Donald Fraser (D-MN) held hearings in August 1973 to investigate U.S. human rights policies. In the process, Fraser relied not only on the usual cast of characters from the State Department, United Nations, and other governing bodies to provide testimony but also non-governmental officials usually cut off from such proceedings. Consequently, as Walker has argued, Fraser "legitimized their perspective in this educational project." (38) The involvement of such persons is evident in the subcommittee's 1974 report, "Human Rights in the World Community: A Call for U.S. Leadership." Most substantially, the report's argument that U.S. foreign aid had important ramifications for human rights abuses led to a Sense of Congress resolution being attached to section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which prohibited security assistance to those nations guilty of committing human rights abuses. Here, in concrete form, was a "central premise," in the words of Walker, of the blueprint created by human rights activists. One year later, Joseph Eldridge of the Washington Office on Latin America authored the Harkin Amendment, which Congressman Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced as an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act as a means to end economic assistance to nations committing