In this interview with RevDem editor Kasia Krzyżanowska, Rochelle Terman discusses her most recent book The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires published with Princeton University Press (2023).
Rochelle Terman — an assistant professor of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press.
Kasia Krzyżanowska: How do you define the politics of shaming in international relations? Why do you think shaming is a powerful tool of norm enforcement in international politics and what is its place among other international measures like economic sanctions or the withdrawal of foreign aid?
Rochelle Terman: When international relations scholars talk about shaming, what we are referring to is something not unlike shaming between individuals. Actually, it is the application of social sanctions to enforce a norm. In the international realm that comes from states, human rights organizations, like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, sometimes it goes through the United Nations… It is all the exertion of moral pressure on countries that violate norms like human rights. For example, when Amnesty International asks you to sign a petition on behalf of a political prisoner in China, or the United Nations issues a resolution condemning state violence in Syria, that is shaming. It is putting the country in the spotlight, condemning violations, and urging reform.
Shaming is by far the most common tool to enforce human rights and humanitarian norms.
Sometimes we will see other methods of enforcement, like economic sanctions or military intervention, but only the most powerful states can afford to do that. Shaming, on the other hand, is practiced routinely by virtually every state in the modern era. I focus especially on states criticizing other states.
There is a consensus in many areas of IR. Not for all, but for many observers shaming is one of the best tools that we have to combat human rights violations. Shaming isolates a regime from the international community and embarrasses its leaders, which then incentivizes governments to comply with human rights norms in order to maintain legitimacy. Shaming could also mobilize domestic opposition in the target state, which could then put pressure on policymakers from their own population.
My research challenges that conventional wisdom. I start with the observation that in many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but could incite a backlash, provoking resistance, and even worsening human rights practices.
The main questions that I seek to answer are when does shaming lead to an improvement in human rights conditions and when does it backfire? In cases where it does backfire, why do actors do it in the first place?
You mentioned that shaming is the most common tool routinely used by the states, but then again, some areas of human rights violations are not covered. What causes international shaming in the first place? What is the logic behind this mechanism of international attention being paid to some human rights violations while others are ignored? In other words, how does the global morality market operate?
Some human rights violations receive a lot of attention and others hardly get any attention, or if they do get attention, a lot of states are not willing to criticize or condemn them. Shaming can be risky, even if it is purely rhetorical. It has the risk of alienating potential friends and allies. For example, many countries, including Muslim countries, have refused to condemn China’s alleged abuse of the Uyghurs because they fear undermining this valuable strategic relationship. The United States was reluctant to shame Saudi Arabia over the death of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. We have protected Saudi Arabia’s rights violations for a long time and that is because human rights are a touchy subject. Saudi Arabia did not appreciate being criticized in this area and threatened to retaliate economically. Those are called enforcement costs – it is the basic idea that shaming can be potentially costly for the shamer.
At the same time, we still see states do it quite often. I think that states choose to shame norm violations for three reasons. The first is simply to enforce a desired norm of behavior. I might shame someone I see littering in the park, for example, because I do not like being surrounded by trash, and I want that person to pick up their waste. That is the more straightforward motivation. But when it comes to human rights, the beneficiaries of human rights are citizens in other countries. So, even if leaders can genuinely believe in the global human rights project, it can often be difficult to overcome those enforcement costs strictly by trying to enforce this desired norm.
However, there are two other motivations that come into play – there are social rewards. The first is that states shame norm violations to collect rewards from audiences. So, I might see someone litter in the park, and I shame them not necessarily because I think that they are going to comply with my demands, but because maybe I get some reward from those around me who also do not like to see waste and littering. In the international realm that can be domestic public, those could be international audiences… The idea is that by publicly enforcing norms you are pleasing third-party audiences that genuinely believe in human rights and want to see them protected.
The third reason is to stigmatize the target or degrade its status on the world stage. You see that kind of weaponized shaming a lot. Think about the Cold War, for example. The United States was stigmatizing the Soviet Union, publicizing human rights violations, the Soviet Union was doing the exact same thing to the United States, publicizing stuff like racial discrimination and so on.
Those social reasons are important because they explain how shaming can be rational, even when it is not expected to work.
By work, I mean results in compliance- because compliance is not necessarily the only goal. If your goal is to stigmatize your opponent with that kind of weaponized shaming, you might actually want to see them continue violating human rights because it provides additional opportunities to stigmatize them.
Let us now focus on the target state. Somehow counterintuitively, you found that international shaming can lead to defensive reactions among the domestic human rights actors. When does shaming related to human rights violations backfire and actually exacerbates these violations? If there is an evidence of ignoring or even doubling down the violations, and negative domestic reactions to shaming arise, why do the shaming countries continue their international practices?
Shaming can backfire by sparking a negative reaction in the target state, especially from domestic audiences. The great insight here is that people typically resent being told what to do.
It is pretty intuitive, especially being told what to do by foreign actors, so they respond defensively. In light of that defensive reaction, leaders in the target state can be rewarded for standing up to international pressure and defending the nation against this perceived attack. Meanwhile, leaders who “give in” and comply with foreign demands might have their political legitimacy undermined at home. So, the result is that violations could persist or even exacerbate. That can happen even if leaders have little ideological motivation to pursue violations.
For example, some reporters observed that when Uganda proposed a version of its anti-homosexuality bill in 2009, there was a lot of shaming from Western states. President Museveni, by all accounts, preferred a more moderate solution, but precisely because he was shamed so publicly by Western states he was really backed into a corner. He could not veto the bill or get rid of it because that would be incredibly domestically unpopular, so he signed the bill quite ostentatiously in front of the eyes of the international community. All that raises a question – if it backfires, why do it?
I think it goes deeper than just short-sightedness or strategic blunders. The key point is that political actors, as I explained earlier, shame not only or even primarily to compel compliance. For states wishing to stigmatize their geopolitical rivals, for example, that kind of defensive backlash is not just acceptable, it might even be welcome because it provides additional opportunities to tarnish the target’s legitimacy. In the book, I explain that interaction as endogenous. It just means that there is this structure of underlying incentives for both parties that fuels both really harsh enforcement, but also backlash – you can think of it as a shame defiance spiral.
You argue in the book that the critic “matters as much as (perhaps more than) the criticism”. How important for the shamed government’s behavior is the close relationship with the shaming state? What are the examples of a broader effect of the geopolitics of shaming and how tangible are such system-level trends, as you named them? What do they depend on?
In my view, the relationship between shamer and target is absolutely critical. That relationship is historical, it is economic, it is geopolitical, it is strategic. Shaming means very different things when it comes from friends, and when it comes from enemies.
Criticism that is coming from a strategic partner is more costly because you have a relationship with this actor. You want to maintain that relationship, so if they are mad at you, then that is forceful. It is also more credible because there are few strategic incentives to criticize your friends. There is no incentive to lie. Shaming in that case serves as a credible signal that human rights violations really did happen. In that case, the target is more likely to take that criticism seriously and comply, not only to maintain a valued relationship with their legitimacy writ large.
The problem is that kind of shaming – shaming that comes from your geopolitical or strategic friends and allies – rarely happens. More often, countries are shamed by their geopolitical rivals, and that is less costly and less forceful.
Because there is no valued relationship to protect, there are few incentives to make the shamer happy by complying with their demands. Additionally, those kinds of accusations are often less credible. They are seen as a cynical attempt to sully the target’s reputation and all of that allows the target to deny the accusations. It can even make sense, as we discussed earlier, for the target governments to double down in defiance of shaming if those relevant audiences also have an antagonistic relationship with the shamer.
When leaders violate their norms, they generate these tangible political rewards. Because of these incentives, we have something like a paradox. We have a system where adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response. Allies are the most effective enforcers of human rights norms, but they are often reluctant to do it in the first place.
Shaming is most common in situations where it is least likely to be effective.
Would you like to elaborate on the system-level trends in the case of the conflict between Israel and Palestine?
The politicization of human rights is very much on display when it comes to Israel. On the one hand, many Israelis are very suspicious of international institutions and international criticism, and it is not too difficult to see why the former UN Human Rights Committee and the current Human Rights Council have been accused of anti-Israel bias, promoting double standards… for example, I think the Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than the rest of the world combined. You will often hear criticism from Israel, but also some places in Europe, and certainly the United States, that the international human rights mechanisms and organs disproportionately focus on Israel. That is important because it is seen as weaponized and motivated by these hostile anti-Israel, even antisemitic motivations.
Not surprisingly, those criticisms do not tend to work very well on Israeli public opinion. If anything, it drives those defensive reactions.
There is an interesting study that showed that international criticism in the form of threats of economic sanctions actually increased support for hardline right-wing policies, even among Israelis who are on the left.
Even among Israelis who would be otherwise sympathetic to the issue of settlements, for example, international criticism pushed them further to the right. That is one perspective on the situation.
On the other hand, I think it is also pretty clear that Israel’s allies, especially the United States, make a concerted effort to protect Israel from legitimate human rights criticism because of our own geopolitical interests.
The politicization works both ways here. Israel has been in some ways unfairly demonized, but also unfairly protected in the international realm. In fact, you can not have one without the other.
For many countries, South Africa, for example, there is a lot of hypocrisy in the way the countries are punished for war crimes in the International Criminal Court or through military intervention. Historically, when humanitarian norms have been enforced, they have mostly been in the global South, and the United States and Western countries, have been protected.
I think all of that helps to understand the significance of South Africa specifically bringing these charges. This is a country with a very recent history of apartheid and racist violence, which was supported by the United States and Israel for a long time. Palestine has been a very prominent issue there since its founding. Israel’s reaction to the ICJ cases is important, but it is not the only motivation for South Africa. Even if this ICJ case has no effect on Israel, there might be very good reasons for South Africa to bring the case, to prosecute the case, to attempt to enforce this anti-genocide norm. Because they are enforcing what I call metanorms, the norm to enforce a norm. South Africa is being encouraged, it is benefiting in its own image in some sense by punishing what many people around the world see as clear, horrific, brutal abuses.
Do I think that the ICJ case will deter Israel in any way? No, not by itself, but one thing it could do is to mobilize political pressure in the United States.
If international pressure is going to have any impact on curtailing the destruction in Gaza, it has to come from the United States. This is not because the United States has any moral high ground, just that it shares a strategic relationship with Israel and has protected it for so long. If we actually put our strategic influence on the line here that could actually have an impact and that is why many people in the United States are pressuring Biden to do something. It would be the most effective, but it is also going to be the hardest thing to mobilize.
As a follow-up question, how do you assess the measures decided by the ICJ? Do you think they are somehow groundbreaking or very important for the case or just normal measures in such cases?
I am not an expert in international law, I would love to talk to a lawyer who is working in international law to know the legal significance of it, but I am particularly interested in the political significance of this preliminary ruling because the ICJ has no enforcement power.
If it is going to have a practical impact, it is going to be through, in my view, mobilizing third-party countries, especially the United States. I saw a poll recently that among Jewish Israelis, half of the population think the ruling was too harsh, even though it did not actually find Israel guilty of genocide.
I think a lot of people are trying to figure out a way to apply international law fairly, principally, and without politics. In my view, politics is absolutely essential and inescapable because the only way that the international efforts are going to actually have an effect is through political leverage, especially from the states that already have a lot of political leverage over Israel, i. e. the United States.
Coming back to your book, you analyzed the UN Human Rights Council review system, and based on that, what kind of human rights topics are safe to be tackled by a geopolitical partner, and which are less likely to be discussed? How do the target states actually respond to the UN Council recommendations?
The United Nations Human Rights Council organizes this process called the Universal Periodic Review or UPR for short. The goal is to periodically review the human rights situation of every member of the United Nations. The way that it works is through a system of peer review. So, a country like the United States goes up for review every four, four and a half years, and then every other country has the opportunity to offer feedback in the form of specific recommendations. Some countries might say: I recommend that you abolish the death penalty. This is a very common recommendation against the United States. The state under review has to publicly respond and decide whether or not it accepts or rejects each recommendation. Basically, whether it sees each recommendation as legitimate or not.
The UPR offers this really fascinating laboratory for the study of international shaming and we can use statistical analysis to see what are the effects of the strategic relationship between the one issuing the recommendation and the ones receiving the recommendation. It turns out that strategic relationships do play a really important role.
In the first place, states tend to go easier on their friends in the review process. They are less severe in their commentary, and they shy away from sensitive topics.
The basic intuition is that some human rights issues are more sensitive than others. Rights like free speech, torture, genocide, and those kinds of accusations could really undermine the stability of the ruling regime, for example, by fostering political competition.
Those abuses are directly attributable to state agents, whereas other rights – the right to health, and the right to development – are less threatening to target regimes because the violations of those rights tend to reside in the private sphere, or in the lack of capacity.
It is one thing to say that I actively chose to torture my political rival. It is another thing to say that if I could provide universal health care to my entire population, I would, but we just do not have the resources. Another example is women’s rights. A lot of the substantive commentary in this process has to do with women’s rights, but the specific issues that we are talking about are things like trafficking… for example, what do you do to protect women from trafficking? You increase police presence. You increase surveillance and state control. The violators in those cases tend to be private actors or not government actors. So, if I receive a recommendation on trafficking, it is not as costly to me as an accusation of torture or violating free speech.
There are social problems that are easy to embrace because they do not threaten the power of the incumbent regime. Those types of things – women’s rights, often rights against child trafficking, right to health – become like a safety valve in the human rights regime. It provides an opportunity for states to appear like they are diligently participating in human rights institutions, holding other states accountable, and performing those metanorms (the norm to enforce norms). But at the same time, they can do that without seriously confronting their geopolitical allies, without undermining their strategic interests. We see that states go easy on their friends, and by the same token, countries are more likely to criticize their adversaries on particularly sensitive issues. If you compare the United States’ review of Saudi Arabia to the United States’ review of Iran, for example – they share many things in common, share many similar records of human rights violations, but the United States, when issuing feedback to Saudi Arabia, tends to focus on things like women’s rights and not on things like murdering journalists and torture, but we go particularly harsh on Iran because we have an adversary relationship.
Turning to the state under review, the target states have to publicly decide whether or not they accept or reject each recommendation. States respond very differently depending on who the recommendation is coming from. States are more likely to accept criticism coming from their geopolitical friends and that is even after controlling for the content of the recommendation. In other words, if I am a state, I get a specific recommendation from a friend, I get the exact same recommendation in terms of content from my adversary, and I am more likely to accept the one from my ally and reject the one from my adversary.
When does the label of human rights violator become an ontological one, imposed as a stigma? If a country is shamed as a human rights violator but then improves the situation, does the international community somehow change its shaming label or it just stays with the country forever?
In the international realm, much like the interpersonal realm, states have reputations and those reputations can be sticky, meaning that they can persist, even when objective attributes or behavior change.
They can be internalized even as an identity of a state. Some states might actually embrace the label, or embrace the stigma. If I am stigmatized by my political adversary maybe I could wear it as a badge of honor or a signal of pride.
That being said, there are situations in which reputations change drastically but that tends to happen during a period of profound transition. I am thinking of Germany, for example, after World War 2, South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime, or Iran after the Islamic revolution, when we had these drastic changes in the governing structure of states. But, I think even in those cases, whether the stigma is coming from the international community, or it is coming from the internal conversation inside countries, sometimes those stigmas can persist. So, in Germany, for example, there is still a very salient memory and a feeling tone of apology, and those can linger.
Would it be China that is most shamed or stigmatized as a human rights violator or some other states are even more?
It is really hard to say because first, there are a lot of different kinds of human rights. As we were talking earlier, are we talking about physical integrity rights? Are we talking about socioeconomic rights? Are we talking about discriminating against minorities and so on… oftentimes these violations are hidden, so we do not have information on them and if you see a country that seems to be getting worse in its human rights violations over time, it is hard to know whether it is really getting worse on the ground, or if we just have more information about it.
For that reason, it is not only difficult to say which country is the “worst”. We can probably talk about some countries that, according to Amnesty National Human Rights Watch, tend to have the reputation of being the worst of the worst, but it is hard to make fine-grained distinctions. It is especially hard to know if human rights are improving as a secular trend over time, there is an interesting debate in political science about whether in general, across the world human rights are getting better over time. That is also a hard question to answer because the standards of human rights have changed over time.
I cannot say whether China is the worst or better, but I will that perhaps if we were in China right now, there would maybe be a podcast going on, someone asking if the United States is the worst human rights violator in the world.
I am not saying that everything is relative, of course, but just to point out how politicized these conversations are and how important our perspective is.
My last question would regard another example- what kind of shaming mechanisms do you observe in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? What is the role played here by a nonstate actor, so the EU?
I think that Putin greatly underestimated the extent to which the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would generate international outrage. He made a miscalculation there, and in some ways, it is not difficult to see how he made that miscalculation. In just a few months before the invasion, in December 2021, there was a vote in the United Nations on a resolution condemning Russia for aggression in Crimea. During that vote, 62 countries chose to condemn Russia, 22 countries did not, and the rest abstained.
If I am Putin and I am looking at that, I am thinking: “Okay, if I invade Ukraine, maybe I will get some pushback from Europe, the United States, and the NATO countries, Western Alliance”. I can just fight back against that by saying that this is just an instance of weaponized shaming, that they are biased against us, they are anti-Russia, they are motivated by their own geopolitical interest, and so on.
In March of the following year, there was another vote. This was after Russia decided to go for it. This time the resolution was condemning the recent invasion of Ukraine with 141 yeses. 141 countries condemned Russia, and only five countries voted no. Russia had lost much of the support of countries, especially in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia, and even countries in its voting bloc, like Cuba, North Korea, and Nicaragua abstained. These are countries that always support Russia in the United Nations.
Taking that together, it is one thing to dismiss outrage from the European Union or NATO. It is more difficult to dismiss the outrage and condemnation that is coming from the global South.
If Putin knew how globally unpopular the invasion would be, maybe he would have thought differently about it.
The role of the EU and other non-state actors is tricky because again, we have to think about the critic and their relationship to the target. I am not an expert on this, but if I were to apply my theory to the situation, I would probably intuitively think that criticism from countries that have been sympathetic to Russia in the past is going to be a lot more forceful than actors that have been historically antagonistic towards Russia. That does not mean that they do not have a role or that they should stand back and do nothing. They could perhaps serve a role by supporting Ukraine in other ways. But I would be looking really carefully at other kinds of NGOs, human rights organizations, countries, and actors that cannot be as easily dismissed for being “anti-Russia”.
In collaboration with Lorena Drakula.
