Social Mechanisms to Promote International Human Rights: Complementary or Contradictory?
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Description
The study of the international human rights regime has increasingly emphasized how this regime matters rather than if it matters. An especially productive turn focuses on integrated conceptual models, which accept the importance of multiple forms of influence on state behavior. The Power of Human Rights (PoHR) provided a foundation for such studies by bringing attention to the significance of different logics of interaction at different points in the socialization process of states. That leading work and allied scholarship recognize the complexity of actor motivation, human and organizational behavior, and the global-level social environment. What is needed now is a social theory that accounts for why human rights abuses occur and how the international community does or might influence rights abusers to alter their behavior. The objective is to explain how changes in the relevant social environment—namely the existence, and ultimately the formal acceptance, of international human rights—affect the behavior of individuals, governments and non-governmental organizations. The “spiral model” of human rights change developed in PoHR—and further elaborated in this volume—is an important step in developing such a theory. At a high level of generality, the model provides a conceptually and empirically compelling account of the relationship between national policies and formal international human rights regimes. On this model, various socialization processes work together to influence non-compliant states to accept and ultimately comply with human rights norms through a five-stage process: repression, denial, tactical concessions, prescriptive status, and rule-consistent behavior. The model emphasizes how instrumental adaptation, argumentation and habitualization impel states first to commit formally to human rights regimes and thereafter, under certain conditions, to internalize human rights norms. Four mechanisms of social influence are identified by the authors as crucial to modeling the domestic political consequences of the human rights regime: coercion; incentivization; persuasion/learning; and capacity-building. Relevant actors move from conduct indicative of the “repression” phase to conduct indicative of the “rule-consistent behavior” phase because they are forced, encouraged by material incentive, convinced by persuasive argument, or enabled to do so. These mechanisms might work directly on governmental officials or they might work indirectly by mobilizing other relevant actors to influence government officials. The point is that international human rights norms—under certain conditions, through these socialization processes—prompt some relevant actors to change their behavior and/or their views. The strengths of this approach are considerable. The interaction between various relevant actors is conceptualized as a dynamic social encounter, triggering a range of socialization processes. The theoretical account is mechanism-based, identifying the processes whereby certain social predicates cause certain outcomes. The inventory of mechanisms is comprehensive—and ontologically eclectic. The model, as a consequence, yields clear, testable predictions about the nature of human rights change. Empirical work relying at least in part on this model has, and will continue to, provide subtle refinements. One important, but correctable, weakness of this approach is the way in which it conceptualizes (or fails to conceptualize) the relationship between the various mechanisms of social influence. According to the “spiral model,” international human rights norms, through various agents and in various ways, often mobilize each mode of influence. The assumption is that these mechanisms are broadly, if not completely, complementary. This assumption of complementarity, we will argue, is empirically suspect; and it inhibits refinement of the model along several axes. The next phase of research on human rights should include two related ambitions. First, it should systematically account for potential negative interactions between mechanisms of influence. Second, it should specifically consider how regime design might accentuate or mitigate such interactions. This is not to say that such considerations were entirely absent from PoHR. That work, and much of the work inspired by it, does reference “backlash” effects. Those references admit to the importance of accounting for negative as well as positive feedback effects. However, such effects are not conceived explicitly and studied systematically as positive or negative interactions between social mechanisms. Also, such “backlash effects” are only a small subset, and perhaps the most obvious form of counter-productive external pressures on state actors. What is needed, in our view, is analysis of a broad range of interactive, sequencing and condition-dependent effects. These should include subtle effects—which are not necessarily recognized by the actors themselves, which do not necessarily involve instrumental calculation, and which may nevertheless produce more durable social change. In short, we need better answers to some core questions: are social mechanisms complementary or contradictory? In what ways are they compatible or incompatible? And what difference do these considerations make for modeling the influence of global norms? This chapter offers reflections on these questions. We first identify and discuss various interaction effects between social mechanisms—emphasizing several crowding-out and crowding-in effects. We then identify and discuss various sequencing effects. Finally, we offer some reflections on whether and how these developments in the behavioral sciences ought to influence the modeling of human rights change.
Source Publication
The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance
Source Editors/Authors
Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, Kathryn Sikkink
Publication Date
2013
Recommended Citation
Goodman, Ryan and Jinks, Derek, "Social Mechanisms to Promote International Human Rights: Complementary or Contradictory?" (2013). Faculty Chapters. 740.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/740
