The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When it Backfires by Rochelle Terman (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When it Backfires by Rochelle Terman
• David P. Forsythe (bio)

Rochelle Terman, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When it Backfires (Princeton University Press 2023), ISBN 9780691250489, 199 pages.

Public criticism of a state's human rights record has long been a staple of world politics. It is practiced by a variety of actors: human rights advocacy groups, heads of international organizations and their agencies, legacy media outlets, disparate voices on social media, religious leaders, business executives, and of course states themselves. This new book by an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago focuses mostly on the latter. Part of what she writes is a matter of proving conventional wisdom, such as noting that states tend to be more vociferously outspoken about the human rights shortcomings of their strategic enemies and competitors than of their political friends. But part of her study raises questions about some conventional wisdom, such as her argument that foreign criticism does not always mobilize significant domestic support for human rights enforcement.

Her conceptual framework is not the history of internationally recognized human rights, or the details of legal obligation under human rights law in different times and places, but rather the relationship between states.¹ She does not discount the roles of human rights nongovernmental organizations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Nor does she ignore international organizations like the United Nations (UN). Indeed, she deals with them in passing, or in the case of the UN in some detail. But she is primarily interested in naming and shaming by states—which may play out at the UN or utilize information by other actors.

What she says most fundamentally is not new—namely that the exercise of power, defined to include influence, is situationally specific. What is attempted and what might succeed varies from case to case. Or, state naming and shaming may take different forms in different relationships, and may have different effects according to the same relationships.

A prominent example in late 2023 can be used to demonstrate one of her sound points. There was vociferous criticism by Iran of Israel's attention to human rights in armed conflict during the war in Gaza. At the same time the United States (U.S.) was telling Israel, without histrionics, to be careful about dangers to civilian Palestinians as Israel sought to militarily defeat Hamas in that crowded enclave. Israel no doubt discounted what Iran had to say and paid at least some attention to what the Biden Administration was telling it. It is prevalent for states to dismiss human [End Page 371] rights criticism from competitors and enemies. Targeted states are more likely to accept critiques from friends. This book shows that well-known trend with careful studies and impressive evidence.

It is also not new to note that often a concerned state will moderate or mute its criticism of a state's human rights violations because of a strategically important relationship. This book spends considerable time discussing U.S. ginger treatment of Mohammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia after the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.² Oil supplies and arms sales were in play, as was containment of Iran, as were future relations between the Kingdom and Israel. So the U.S. government did indeed name and shame Saudi Arabia about political murder, but also limiting, moderating, and eventually downplaying the subject over time.

Where the book breaks some partially new ground relates to the mostly optimistic views of some other authors about combining international and domestic pressures to improve compliance with internationally recognized human rights. It has been argued that if domestic human rights actors link up with their allies abroad, or if domestic actors can appeal to human rights agreements in the domestic policy making process, compliance can be improved.³ This book effectively refines such views. Terman goes to some length in explaining why this progress may not occur in some cases.

Uganda is a good case in point. International and domestic advocates for gay rights (LGBTQ rights) run into strong local custom otherwise, with...