In: Political science quarterly: a nonpartisan journal devoted to the study and analysis of government, politics and international affairs ; PSQ, Band 133, Heft 1, S. 151-152
Why do governments abuse human rights, and what can be done to deter and reverse abusive practices? This article examines the emerging social science on these two questions. Over the last few decades, scholars have made considerable progress in answering the first one. Abuse stems, centrally, from conflict and institutions. Answers to the second question are more elusive because data are scarce and the relationships between cause and effect are hard to pin down. Lively debates concern the effectiveness of tools such as military intervention, economic policy, international law, and information strategies for protecting human rights. The evidence suggests that despite the explosion of international legal instruments, this strategy has had impact only in special circumstances. Powerful states play central roles in protecting human rights through sanctions, impartial military intervention, and other tools – often applied unilaterally, which suggests that there is an ongoing tension between the legitimacy of broad multilateral legal institutions and narrower strategies that actually work. The best approaches to managing human rights depend on the political organization of the abuser. Where strong centralized organizations are the problem, the best strategies alter the incentives of leaders at the top; where abuse arises from disarray, such as during civil war or fragile democratic transition, the key tasks include reducing agency slack and making organizations stronger and more accountable.
This article provides a roadmap for understanding the points of agreement and contention that characterize contemporary empirical scholarship on international human rights legal regimes. It explores what the statistical research teaches us about why states participate in these regimes; knowledge of how these regimes operate; and their relationship to actual human rights behavior. It also describes the central shortcomings of this research tradition and suggests a few areas especially promising for future research. Adapted from the source document.
This article argues that international regime complexity has shaped Europe's politics of human rights trade conditionality by creating opportunities for various types of "forum shopping," and, consequently, that some of the most significant politics of human rights enforcement have occurred in an entirely separate issue area—trade—which are being worked out partly during lawmaking and partly during implementation. The presence of nested and overlapping institutions creates incentives for rival political actors—whether states, institutions, or policymakers—to (1) forum shop for more power, (2) advantage themselves in the context of a parallel or overlapping regime, and (3) invoke institutions á la carte to govern a specific issue but not others. Each tactic creates competition between institutions and actors for authority over the rules, setting hurdles for IO performance. Even so, (4) regime complexity can make enforcement of rules that are impossible to implement in one area possible in another area.
"Naming and shaming" is a popular strategy to enforce international human rights norms and laws. Nongovernmental organizations, news media, and international organizations publicize countries' violations and urge reform. Evidence that these spotlights are followed by improvements is anecdotal. This article analyzes the relationship between global naming and shaming efforts and governments' human rights practices for 145 countries from 1975 to 2000. The statistics show that governments put in the spotlight for abuses continue or even ramp up some violations afterward, while reducing others. One reason is that governments' capacities for human rights improvements vary across types of violations. Another is that governments are strategically using some violations to offset other improvements they make in response to international pressure to stop violations.
A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that globalization promotes government repression of human rights: the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, or extra-judicial killing of citizens, activists, or dissidents by state security forces under the control of ruling state elites. This article employs a variant of Extreme Bounds Analysis in order to analyze the robustness of this growing body of important but contradictory inferences. It argues that (1) we can make robust empirical claims about the relationship between certain trade and investment indicators and government repression, but shows that (2) cumulative knowledge across studies nevertheless remains limited by the sensitivity of many indicators to conditioning sets of information. This problem stems from vaguely specified theoretical mechanisms linking economic processes to government repression and is of potentially great consequence for scholarship seeking to explain the causes of human rights violations, in particular, and the effects of economic globalization, in general.
International organizations (IOs) have moved increasingly in recent years to adopt cross-cutting mandates that require the "mainstreaming" of particular issues, such as gender equality or environmental protection, across all IO policies. Successful IO performance with respect to such mandates, we hypothesize, is determined in large part by the use of hard or soft institutional measures to shape the incentives of sectoral officials whose cooperation is required for successful implementation. We test this hypothesis with respect to two such mandates—gender mainstreaming and environmental policy integration—in a single international organization, the European Union, demonstrating a strong causal link between the use of hard incentives and IO performance in these and related mandates.
Over the past two decades, human rights language has spread like wildfire across international policy arenas. The activists who sparked this fire are engaged in two different campaigns. The first is comparatively modest, involving the persuasion of tens of thousands of global elites such as journalists, UN officials, donors, and national political leaders. The second is broader and more complex: to have a real impact on the behavior of tens of millions of state agents worldwide. While most international relations scholars agree that the first campaign has made real gains, opinions are split on the success—past, present, and future—of the second. In part, these divisions fall along methodological lines. With some exceptions, qualitative scholars working in the empirical international relations tradition express more optimism than their quantitative counterparts, whose contributions to the subfield are relatively new. This article reviews several new books on human rights and shows how their insights engage with these ongoing methodological debates. The authors argue that both qualitative and quantitative approaches offer important strengths and that neither has a monopoly on truth. Still, the human rights discourse may be thriving, at least in part, for reasons unrelated to impact. The authors conclude with suggestions for a more systematic and multimethod research, along with a plea for scholarly attention to the potential downsides of international human rights promotion.