Backlash movements often engage in extraordinary acts of deviance and taboo-breaking. Yet violating mainstream norms is costly, as it provokes public condemnation and stigma. Why do backlash movements transgress mainstream norms? In this essay, I argue that deviance and stigma are central elements of backlash politics and serve important functions for backlash movements. Building off insights from Sociology, I show how 'secondary deviance' is commonly embraced in groups that experience status deprivation. I apply these insights to backlash movements in order to illuminate why transgression is so often a part of their repertoire. Violating dominant norms – and provoking mainstream stigma and rebuke – advances the goals of backlash movements by allowing them to cultivate a distinct group identity, instil collective sentiments of status deprivation, and validate the movement's political claims in popular discourse. In brief, backlash movements engage in certain behaviours not in spite of their deviant status, but because of this status.
This article discusses recent critical works within the frame of what is considered a paramount concern in feminist scholarship today: How do we name and publicize acts of violence against women without providing ideological fuel for orientalism and Islamophobia? By privileging a critique of western imperialism in discussions of violence against women in Muslim contexts, I argue this work: 1) obscures a complete understanding of violence against women in Muslim contexts, 2) is unjustifiably dismissive and belittling to activists working in the Muslim world, and 3) is an expression of a Euro/American experience of Islamophobia post 9/11 that is projected in an ahistorical and politically counterproductive way onto local Muslim and Arab communities. The cumulative result is a teleology of an anti-imperialism that naturalizes the double bind between Islamophobia and gender injustice by presenting women's rights activism not just as complicit in imperialism and Islamophobia but as inescapably imperialist and Islamophobic.
"A bold new perspective on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcementWhen a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.Drawing on a wide range of evidence-from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies-Rochelle Layla Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, she shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response while friends and allies are the most effective shamers but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions.Upending conventional wisdom on the role of norms in world affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming demonstrates that politicization is integral to-not a corruption of-the success of the global human rights project"--
"A bold new perspective on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcementWhen a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.Drawing on a wide range of evidence-from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies-Rochelle Layla Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, she shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response while friends and allies are the most effective shamers but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions.Upending conventional wisdom on the role of norms in world affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming demonstrates that politicization is integral to-not a corruption of-the success of the global human rights project"--
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This article examines portrayals of Muslim women in US news media. I test two hypotheses derived from theories of gendered orientalism. First, US news coverage of women abroad is driven by confirmation bias. Journalists are more likely to report on women living in Muslim and Middle Eastern countries if their rights are violated but report on women in other societies when their rights are respected. Second, stories about Muslim women emphasize the theme of women's rights violations and gender inequality, even for countries with relatively good records of women's rights. Stories about non-Muslim women, on the other hand, emphasize other topics. I test these hypotheses on data from thirty-five years of New York Times and Washington Post reporting using a structural topic model along with statistical analysis. The results suggest that US news media propagate the perception that Muslims are distinctly sexist. This, in turn, may shape public attitudes toward Muslims, as well as influence policies that involve Muslims at home and abroad.
This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of international "naming and shaming": a ubiquitous tactic used by states and civil society to improve international human rights. When does international shaming lead to the improvement in human rights conditions, and when does it backfire, resulting in the worsening of human rights practices or a backlash against international norms? Instead of understanding transnational norms as emanating from some monolithic "international community," I propose that we gain better analytic insight by considering the ways in which norms are embodied in particular actors and identities, promoted and contested between specific states in relational terms. Starting from this approach, I apply insights from sociology, social psychology, and criminology to develop a theory of international "defiance," or the increase in norm offending behavior caused by a proud, shameless reaction against a sanctioning agent. As detailed in Chapter 2, defiance unfolds through domestic and international logics that incentivize elites to violate international norms for political gain. Anticipating these political effects, regimes often provoke and manipulate shaming for strategic purposes. In the long-term, defiance can attach oppositional norms to collective identity, transforming domestic and international normative orders. I argue that international pressure is more likely to provoke defiance under three conditions: (1) the target has weak social ties with the shamer (e.g. economic, political, or ideological); (2) the shamer lacks credibility due to bias or inaccuracy; and (3) the shame is stigmatizing, denigrating the actor instead of the behavior. Existing empirical studies on "naming and shaming" tend to focus exclusively on the country being shamed, obscuring the relational dynamics at the core of the shaming process. My empirical work, in contrast, explores these relationships head-on. In Chapter 3, I evaluate the role of social ties (the first condition driving defiance) in both the causes and consequences of interstate shaming using novel data from the Universal Periodic Review, a process conducted by the United Nations wherein states "peer review" one another's human rights practices. I show that not only is shaming driven by the relationship between sender and target, but states will accept or defy shaming based on this relationship, regardless of the norm in question. In other words, when it comes to human rights shaming, the critic matters just as much as the criticism.Chapter 4 shines the spotlight on the shamer, exposing the political biases that shape human rights reporting. I argue that if human rights reporting is stigmatizing, it can risk defiance and backlash. How can one measure and compare stigma in media portrayals in a systematic way? I propose a solution using new data on U.S. news coverage of global women's rights, 1980-2014 along with novel computational text analysis tools. Chapter 4 presents evidence suggesting that American media stigmatizes Muslims in their coverage of women's rights abroad by propagating the stereotype that Muslims are uniquely or particularly discriminatory against women.While I cannot address the impact of such coverage writ large, I follow up on one particular story that captured widespread media attention in 2010-11: the "Save Sakineh" campaign, which involved a massive, global shaming operation directed at Iran for sentencing a woman to stoning for adultery of 2010-11. Chapters 5 and 6 conduct an in-depth qualitative study of the case, leveraging in-depth interviews and extensive archival research to trace the micro-politics of defiance. I illustrate the role of social ties, credibility, and stigma in the development of the campaign, as well as the co-constitutive relationship between Western shaming and Iranian defiance. Chapter 7 concludes by sketching some additional implications of my argument, directions for future research, and policy recommendations.
Conventional wisdom treats politicization in the international human rights regime as invariant: for any given violation, states condemn adversaries while coddling friends. However, we find that politicization patterns vary markedly across human rights issues. Some norms are more politicized than others, and states are more likely to punish geopolitical partners on certain violations. We offer a novel theory of politicized enforcement wherein states punish human rights violations discriminatively based on their perceived "sensitivity" for the target state. Using data from the UN Universal Periodic Review, an elaborate human rights mechanism, we show that states tend to criticize their adversaries on sensitive issues that undermine the target regime's power and legitimacy while addressing safer topics with friends. By uncovering a strategic logic of human rights enforcement, this research contributes new theoretical insights on the relationship between norms and power politics in global governance.
Although human rights are widely endorsed in the abstract, significant variation exists in the degree to which different states endorse different rights. To what extent is the international human rights community divided? This research note examines fragmentation in the international human rights regime using an inductive, data-driven approach. We trace states' normative positions as they are expressed in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a UN mechanism where states "peer review" one another's human rights practices. We analyze over 56,000 recommendations from the first two cycles of the UPR using data collected from the non-profit organization UPR Info. Employing unsupervised scaling and clustering methods, we find four interstate clusters or factions emerging from this process: Civil Libertarians, Developmentalists, Institutionalists, and Egalitarians. Our results indicate that the international human rights regime reflects less a singular community than a set of communities, each constituted by a distinct configuration of normative positions. They also reveal new insights about specific norms: while women's rights and children's rights are broadly endorsed, norms related to sexuality and migration are more contentious and partisan. While our findings are descriptive, they lay the foundation for new causal questions of interest to scholars of human rights and international norms.
AbstractLow political support for religious minority groups in the United States is often explained as a matter of social distance or unfamiliarity between religious traditions. Observable differences between beliefs and behaviors of religious minority groups and the cultural mainstream are thought to demarcate group boundaries. However, little scholarship has examined why some practices become symbolic boundaries that reduce support for religious accommodation in public policy, while nearly identical practices are tolerated. We hypothesize that politics is an important component of the process by which some religious practices are transformed into demarcations between "us" and "them." We conduct an original survey experiment in which people are exposed to an identical policy demand—women-only swim times at a local public pool—attributed to three different religious denominations (Muslim, Jewish, and Pentecostal). We find that people are less supportive of women-only swim times when the requesting religion is not a part of their partisan coalition.
