This article traces the global humanitarian sector’s late twentieth-century embrace of human rights to the brutal civil conflict in El Salvador in the 1980s. Drawing on evidence from NGOs in three Anglophone states (Britain, Canada, and Ireland), it examines the moral and political debates that accompanied the breakthrough for human rights activism in that period, and how they conditioned contemporaneous understandings of ‘aid’. From that foundation, the article makes two claims. First, it argues that the ‘triumph’ of human rights in the late twentieth century was the product of a complex set of diplomatic, intellectual, and ideological factors that were of global, rather than simply of Western, origin. Second, by tracing what could and could not be done in the name of humanitarianism, the article brings us closer to understanding how even the most outwardly progressive vision of intervention was produced within a very specific – hierarchical and paternalistic – imagining of the Global South.

中文翻译：

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萨尔瓦多内战和基于权利的人道主义的起源

本文追溯了 20 世纪后期全球人道主义部门对人权的拥护，以及 1980 年代萨尔瓦多残酷的国内冲突。它借鉴了三个英语国家（英国、加拿大和爱尔兰）的非政府组织的证据，考察了在那个时期伴随着人权激进主义突破的道德和政治辩论，以及它们如何影响了同时代对“援助”的理解。在此基础上，本文提出了两个主张。首先，它认为，20 世纪后期人权的“胜利”是一系列复杂的外交、知识和意识形态因素的产物，这些因素是全球性的，而不仅仅是西方的。其次，通过追踪以人道主义的名义可以做什么和不可以做什么，