Bringing the Individual Back In: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Global Politics

Transcription

1 Bringing the Individual Back In: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Global Politics Abstract: Transnational advocacy networks (TANs) are revolutionising global politics by empowering local actors against established institutions and networking individuals across states. Emerging regional and global human rights regimes are legitimised and popularised by transnational advocacy. This essay provides a brief historical sketch of the emergence of TANs and assesses their contribution to international relations theory and practice, particularly in the field of constructivism. It argues that for TANs to remain relevant within the human rights discourse they must move away from binary descriptions of victims and perpetrators and toward more proactive strategies of empowerment. Keywords: TANs, human rights, constructivism, agency, empowerment. 1

2 Transnational advocacy networks (TANs) provide the key variable in the creation of a democratic space in which the global discourse on human rights can thrive. Their relatively horizontal and transnational organising structure, in addition to the principles and norms that they propagate, enable TANs to project the human rights movement on an unprecedented scale. In this manner, TANs are revolutionising international relations theory by augmenting constructivist approaches that are accelerating the trend toward an individual-centric conception of global politics, and thus providing a more robust role for human agency. This essay is divided into three parts: first, I examine how specific TANs such as Amnesty International prised open a policymaking arena traditionally reserved for international elites; second, I discuss the theoretical implications of Keck and Sikkink's transnationalism; third and finally, I assess some of the critiques of the study of TANs and offer some tentative conclusions. Agenda setting power: creating space for a human rights discourse to flourish Transnational advocacy networks are coalitions of committed actors organisations and individuals that span state borders. Their largely non-hierarchical, horizontal organisational structure does not make them unique: what distinguishes TANs is their advocacy their dedication to the promotion of values and ideas on behalf of impoverished communities. 1 TANs evolved over the latter half of the twentieth century in reaction to the apparently stalled progress of the postwar human rights regime. After initial institutional successes in the form of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, founded in 1946, and the codification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the salience of human rights waned on the global stage as the Cold War heated up. Although individuals, such as Raphael Lemkin, and a few NGOs (mostly US-based), were relatively successful in lobbying governments during the negotiation of the UN Charter in San Francisco in 1944, and other foundational documents such as the Genocide Convention, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, state interests ultimately retarded the development of a human rights legal regime. 2 Superpower rivalry privileged emphasis on security and material interests in both the academic and activist spheres, suffocating the available space for human rights advocacy. However, because of the potential threat of nuclear holocaust and the consequent need to fight the War by proxy, the superpowers and their allies increasingly used the language of human rights to justify their foreign policies. The resultant discrepancy between states' rhetoric and action regarding human 1 Keck, M. E., and Sikkink, K., Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (1998), p Power, S., A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Flamingo, London (2003), pp

3 rights conduct caused great disillusionment in the public sphere and precipitated the rise of TANs to rectify this expectation-outcome gap. The key historical juncture was the 1970s, when the juxtaposition of several political crises the CIA's support for Pinochet's coup in 1973, Vietnam, Watergate, the civil rights movement roused publics' desires for an alternative ideology to bankrupt religious and socialist utopias. 3 Human rights, centred around equality and universality, provided an appealing movement at a time of identity crisis and ebbing confidence in traditional institutions. Peter Benenson founded Amnesty International (AI) in 1961 as a non-partisan collective action organisation to stimulate transnational human rights advocacy. The explosion of Amnesty membership during the 1970s particularly AI USA coincided with the growth of other human rights groups in the US and across the world. From only a handful in 1970, the number of human rights lobby groups in Washington rose to over 50 by Regional human rights movements emerged from South America, influenced by liberation theology, and from the USSR as a result of Soviet abuses. The signatories of Charter 77, including Vaclav Havel, criticised the Soviet Czech government for failing to implement the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. Human Rights Watch (HRW) grew out of Helsinki Watch, founded in 1979, to monitor compliance with the Helsinki Accords. These groups were successful in delegitimising the Soviet regime and contributed to its increasing exclusion from the international community. Various TANs, such as AI and Americas Watch, were moreover integral in bringing about regime change in Central and South America during the late 1970s and 1980s. 5 TANs precipitate direct change and force states to integrate human rights into their decision-making calculus through the use of information and images. Amnesty's credibility rests on its status as a respected epistemic community its research staff is now larger than that of the UN's Centre for Human Rights and its moral authority. 6 Its access to privileged knowledge is not unique however, the same is true of most theoretical authorities. Rather it is the way Amnesty empowers individuals locally to affect change and distribute information efficiently through its campaigns that enables the diffusion of human rights norms throughout the international system. This has given Amnesty and other TANs enormous agenda-setting power. In reframing female circumcision as female genital 3 Moyn, S., The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (2010), p Cmiel, K., 'The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States' in The Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 3 (Dec. 1999), p As a result of this heightened lobbying power, the Nixon and Carter administrations began attaching human rights conditions to economic assistance packages. 5 Keck, M. E., and Sikkink, K., Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics, pp Hopgood, S., Keepers of the Flame. Understanding Amnesty International, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (2006), p. 4. 3

4 mutilation a network of women's and human rights organisations increased the salience of the issue, leading to the UN 'Report of the Working Group on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children' in TANs were furthermore instrumental in the creation of the UN children's rights convention, 8 the adoption of the UN anti-landmines treaty, 9 the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), 10 the adoption of the Kimberley Agreement to end the sale of conflict diamonds, 11 and the formation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. 12 TANs thus change both the interests of actors within global politics but also the very environments in which those actors operate, despite limitations on formal involvement in the intergovernmental process. 13 This point will be expanded upon in the theoretical discussion below. Subverting the state: the individual as the appropriate unit of analysis in global politics Transnational advocacy networks are contributing to the deconstruction of the state-centric edifice at the heart of traditional international relations scholarship. Although theories of transnationalism have abounded for several decades see Keohane and Nye's concepts of interdependence and soft power 14 they have only gained significant traction since the publication of Keck and Sikkink's Activists Without Borders in 1998 and the simultaneous constructivist turn in international relations theory. Various phenomena over the past two decades, such as the increasing frequency of financial and ecological crises, broadening and deepening European integration, and the rise in transnational terrorism, prompted scholars to re-examine foundational assumptions of IR theory, namely that the state is the primary and therefore only worthwhile unit of analysis within global politics, and the inviolable norm of state sovereignty. Transnationalism is rooted in a critical constructivist ontology which holds that human agents do 7 Keck, M. E., and Sikkink, K., Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics, p Price Cohen, C., 'The Role of NGOs in the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child' in Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 12 (1990), pp Price, R., 'Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines' in International Organization, vol. 52, no. 3 (1998), pp Glasius, M., 'Expertise in the Cause of Justice: Global Civil Society Influence on the Statute for an International Criminal Court' in M. Glasius, et al (eds.), Global Civil Society, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002), pp Wright, C., 'Tackling Conflict Diamonds: The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme' in International Peacekeeping, vol. 11, no. 4 (2004), pp Mertus, J., 'From Legal Transplants to Transformative Justice: Human Rights and the Promise of Transnational Civil Society' in American University International Law Review, vol. 14, no. 5 (1999), p Price, R., 'Transnational Civil Society and Advocacy in World Politics' in World Politics, vol. 55, no. 4 (2003), p Keohane, R., and Nye, J., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, Longman, London (1977). 4

5 not exist independently from their social environment and its collectively shared systems of meanings. 15 Social structures and agents are thus conceived as mutually constituted. The social environment in which actors find themselves shapes their identities, interests and behaviour as social beings. 16 This is, of course, not a particularly radical theoretical departure. In his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx argues that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. However, unlike most Marxists, constructivists believe that the social world is determined more by intersubjectively-held meanings than material interests. In this light, constructivists have a broader conception of institutions to include both formal rules and regulations but also informal principles and norms these norms, thus endogenous to institutions, are expected to constitute actors, that is, to shape their identities and preferences. 17 Such assumptions directly undercut the methodological individualism underpinning materialist-utilitarian models of global politics, in which actor preferences are exogenously given and fixed. Actors therefore operate according to March and Olsen's logic of appropriateness rather the rationalist logic of consequentiality. 18 Influenced by this constructivist turn, Goodman and Jinks create a theoretical framework to demonstrate how socialisation can influence the creation of international law. Actors can influence one another through acculturation as well as coercion and persuasion. Acculturation operates through assimilative pressures, including the social-psychological costs of nonconformity (cognitive dissonance) and the benefits of conforming to group norms and expectations (comfort associated with social status and membership of a perceived in-group) actors in this way internalise social legitimacy as an authoritative guide for action. 19 Combining the above model with Keck and Sikkink's conception of TANs has massive implications for IR scholarship. Whilst constructivism usefully explains specific phenomena within global politics, such as widening EU integration, it struggles to account for or provide a unified field theory of more systemic change. This is because its sociological institutionalist approach combined with its emphasis on collective, 15 Risse, T., 'Social constructivism and European integration' in A. Wiener and T. Diez (eds.) European Integration Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2004), p Adler, E., 'Seizing the middle ground: constructivism in world politics' in European Journal of International Relations, vol. 3, 1997, pp Pollack, M. A., 'Theorizing the European Union: International Organization, Domestic Polity, or Experiment in New Governance?' in Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 8, 2005, p March, J. G., and Olsen, J. P., Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics, Simon & Schuster, London (1989), pp Goodman, R., and Jinks, D., 'How to Influence States: Socialization and International Law' in Duke Law Journal,, vol. 54, no. 3 (Dec. 2004), pp

6 intersubjectively-held norms neglects questions of individual agency, interest, and power. Agency is also neglected by the neo-neo theories, whereby alterations in the structural composition of the international system through the (re)distribution of states and their capabilities, either via material capabilities and alliances 20 or institutions 21 dictates change. Transnationalism conversely problematises both the conception of the state as the unitary actor and the unidirectional relationship between the social environment and actors' behaviour by bringing the individual back in. Networks and coalitions of individuals, whether guided by a moral belief in the rightness of human rights or a specific political interest such as labour protection or environmental conservation, can affect change across states. Subsumed within this discussion on agency is transnationalism's links with other IR sub-fields, such as critical security studies, that attempt to re-orient the focus from state to individual. 22 For TANs, the individual, rather than the state, is the correct focus actor, as real people rather than abstract political entities are the victims of human rights violations. Framing instances of state repression as both human rights abuse and an abrogation of the state's social contract is therefore useful in deconstructing the norm of sovereignty. Although critiques of Westphalian sovereignty already have a long history, 23 they have been further complexified by the recent institutionalisation of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) norm. RtoP holds that sovereignty entails a dual responsibility: an external one to respect other states' sovereignty and an internal one to protect the rights of its own citizens. 24 The value of RtoP and TANs' preoccupation with individuals is that the focus returns to the appropriate unit of analysis: the duty to protect communities from mass killing, women from systematic rape, children from starvation, and so on. 25 Although these human rights abuses frequently result in negative externalities that spillover state borders regional political instability, refugee flows, water and food scarcity they are often contained within state borders, thus rendering them a different category of problem to traditional international coordination/cooperation problems. Only with the advent and activism of TANs has the domestic sphere been truly opened up and transnationalised. Critiques and conclusions 20 Waltz, K., Theory of International Politics (Boston: Addison Wesley, 1979), pp Keohane, R. O., After Hegemony. Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp See also, Axelrod, R. M., The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p Buzan, B., et al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner, Boulder (1998). 23 Krasner, S. D., Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton University Press, Princeton (1999). 24 Evans, G., and Sahnoun, M., 'The Responsibility to Protect' in Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 6 (2002), p Ibid, p

7 Despite its success in freeing thousands of prisoners of conscience, and elevating the discourse of human rights to an international norm that most states aspire to, it remains difficult to tangibly measure the contribution of Amnesty and other TANs to the global human human rights record. Technology change has both boosted the profile of TANs and given rise to an information paradox: the global human rights situation appears to worsen as we learn more about it. 26 A variety of factors better information gathering techniques, greater organisational capacity and increased financing for NGOs, new categories of human rights abuses and broadened definitions of existing ones, demographic change, etc have contributed to this paradox. But the evaluation problem represents just one of many critiques attacking the burgeoning literature championing the growth of TANs. Other scholars attack transnationalism on the grounds of selection bias, for only using empirical case studies that result in TANs affecting positive regime change. Few TAN scholars engage with the myriad negative effects associated with stimulated transnational activism, such as the democratic deficit within the organisations themselves, their lack of accountability to other bodies, their misallocation of political will and material resources, and their often alarming capacity to worsen the very problems they seek to ameliorate. 27 Excavating beneath this critique reveals a heuristic problem afflicting the social sciences at large. As Keck and Sikkink outline themselves, human rights claims are more effective when mobilised against issues involving bodily harm to vulnerable individuals (which follow a normative logic and map onto a discernible narrative of responsibility) than issues involving legal equality of opportunity (which follow a juridical/institutionalist logic that do not subscribe to easy narratives). 28 TANs are effective in that they simplify reality through the invocation of emotion through images and information rather than attempt to explain reality's complexity. This may appear to place a too heavy burden of proof on what TANs are trying to achieve and after all, they are only following evolutionary logic: the human mind is heuristically hardwired to make quick decisions and follow a linear causality that makes sense in the natural world (when the lion roars, run away or it will eat you) but does not in the man-made one: untangling the many causes of financial crises. 29 Reducing human rights to a binary opposition of victims and oppressors is not only often flawed and erroneous how does one go about punishing the hundreds of thousands of Hutu who participated 26 Clark, A., and Sikkink, K., 'Information Effects and Human Rights Data: Is the Good News about Increased Human Rights Information Bad News for Human Rights Measures?' presented at Hauser Colloquium, NYU Law School, November 2010, p Gourevitch, P., 'Alms Dealers' in The New Yorker, October Keck, M. E., and Sikkink, K., Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics, p Taleb, N. N. The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Penguin, London (2008). 7

8 in the Rwandan genocide but can lead to its own abuses: human rights violations only occur over there in the global South, thereby implicitly legitimating and reinforcing what are in many cases corrupt, decaying or oppressive Western regimes. To prevent a backslide into the ashheap of Western fads, TANs must reframe their human rights cause from protecting victims of repression to empowering equal partners; this will underpin a strategic shift away from reactive shaming to developing proactive strategies of education, prevention and local empowerment Schmitz, H. P., 'Transnational Human Rights Networks: Significance and Challenges' in R. A. Denemark (ed.) The International Studies Association Compendium Project, 2012, accessed online: 8

9 Bibliography Adler, E., 'Seizing the middle ground: constructivism in world politics' in European Journal of International Relations, vol. 3, Axelrod, R. M., The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, New York (1984). Buzan, B., et al., Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner, Boulder (1998). Clark, A., and Sikkink, K., 'Information Effects and Human Rights Data: Is the Good News about Increased Human Rights Information Bad News for Human Rights Measures?' presented at Hauser Colloquium, NYU Law School, November Cmiel, K., 'The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States' in The Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 3 (Dec. 1999). Evans, G., and Sahnoun, M., 'The Responsibility to Protect' in Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 6 (2002). Glasius, M., 'Expertise in the Cause of Justice: Global Civil Society Influence on the Statute for an International Criminal Court' in M. Glasius, et al (eds.), Global Civil Society, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002). Goodman, R., and Jinks, D., 'How to Influence States: Socialization and International Law' in Duke Law Journal,, vol. 54, no. 3 (Dec. 2004). Gourevitch, P., 'Alms Dealers' in The New Yorker, October Hopgood, S., Keepers of the Flame. Understanding Amnesty International, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (2006). Keck, M. E., and Sikkink, K., Activists Beyond Borders. Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca (1998). Keohane, R., and Nye, J., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, Longman, London (1977). Keohane, R. O., After Hegemony. Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, Princeton University Press, Princeton (2005). Krasner, S. D., Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton University Press, Princeton (1999). March, J. G., and Olsen, J. P., Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics, Simon & Schuster, London (1989). Mertus, J., 'From Legal Transplants to Transformative Justice: Human Rights and the Promise of Transnational Civil Society' in American University International Law Review, vol. 14, no. 5 (1999). Moyn, S., The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (2010). Pollack, M. A., 'Theorizing the European Union: International Organization, Domestic Polity or Experiment in New Governance?' in Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 8 (2005). Power, S., A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Flamingo, London (2003). Price, R., 'Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines' in International Organization, vol. 52, no. 3 (1998). Price, R., 'Transnational Civil Society and Advocacy in World Politics' in World Politics, vol. 55, no. 4 (2003). 9

10 Price Cohen, C., 'The Role of NGOs in the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child' in Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 12 (1990). Risse, T., 'Social constructivism and European integration' in A. Wiener and T. Diez (eds.) European Integration Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2004). Schmitz, H. P., 'Transnational Human Rights Networks: Significance and Challenges' in R. A. Denemark (ed.) The International Studies Association Compendium Project, 2012, accessed online: Taleb, N. N. The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Penguin, London (2008). Waltz, K., Theory of International Politics, Addison Wesley, Boston (1979). Wright, C., 'Tackling Conflict Diamonds: The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme' in International Peacekeeping, vol. 11, no. 4 (2004). 10