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While resistance to international courts is not new, what is new, or at least newly conceptualized, is the politics of backlash against these institutions. Saving the International Justice Regime: Beyond Backlash against International Courts is at the forefront of this new conceptualization of backlash politics. It brings together theories, concepts and methods from the fields of international law, international relations, human rights and political science and case studies from around the globe to pose - and answer - three questions related to backlash against international courts: What is backlash and what forms does it take? Why do states and elites engage in backlash against international human rights and criminal courts? What can stakeholders and supporters of international justice do to meet these contemporary challenges?

While resistance to international courts is not new, what is new, or at least newly conceptualized, is the politics of backlash against these institutions. Saving the International Justice Regime: Beyond Backlash against International Courts is at the forefront of this new conceptualization of backlash politics. It brings together theories, concepts and methods from the fields of international law, international relations, human rights and political science and case studies from around the globe to pose - and answer - three questions related to backlash against international courts: What is backlash and what forms does it take? Why do states and elites engage in backlash against international human rights and criminal courts? What can stakeholders and supporters of international justice do to meet these contemporary challenges?

International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom

Since their emergence in the late eighteenth century, doctrines of universal individual rights have been variously criticized as philosophically confused, politically inefficacious, ideologically particular, and Eurocentric. Nevertheless, today the discourse of universal human rights is more internationally widespread and influential than ever. In Evidence for Hope, leading international relations scholar Kathryn Sikkink argues that this is because human rights laws and institutions work. Sikkink rejects the notion that human rights are a Western imposition and points to a wide range of evidence that she claims demonstrates the effectiveness of human rights in bringing about a world that is appreciably improved in many ways from what it was previously. We have invited a broad range of scholars to assess Sikkink's challenging claims.

When international human rights tribunals like the European Court of Human Rights find states responsible for human rights abuses, they ask governments to pay reparation to the victims, engage in symbolic measures, and enact the policy changes necessary to ensure that the violations do not recur. This article considers the conditions under which states comply with these rulings, especially when the tribunals are unable and often unwilling to provide strict enforcement. This article extends current theories about the domestic politics of compliance with international human rights law to the case of the European Court of Human Rights. This article analyzes a new, hand-coded data set on states' compliance with over 1000 discrete obligations handed down by the European Court of Human Rights that ask states to change their human rights policies. The results of these analyses suggest that robust domestic institutions, particularly executive constraints, are the key to compliance with the European Court of Human Rights. When domestic institutions enforce the Court's rulings, the results can be significant changes in states' human rights policies and practices.

In their rulings, international human rights tribunals frequently ask states to engage in costly compliance measures ranging from paying reparations to victims to changing domestic human rights laws and practices. The tribunals, however, have little enforcement or oversight capacity. The responsibility for compliance falls to domestic actors: executives, legislators, and judiciaries. Through nuanced case studies of the compliance process in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, this article suggests that compliance with the Inter-American human rights tribunals' rulings depends on executives' political will for compliance and their ability to build pro-compliance coalitions with judges and legislators.