When Is the Pen Truly Mighty? Regime Type and the Efficacy of Naming and Shaming in Curbing Human Rights Abuses

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Articles

Does naming and shaming by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and Western media affect human rights conditions in target states? The focus on global civil society in international relations¹has led to a vast literature that does not reach a consensus on the effectiveness of INGO and press advocacy in stopping human rights abuses.²Proponents allege that INGOs and the press have a positive influence on the politics and practices of human rights.³'Naming and shaming' as a technique has many supporters, on both the academic and practitioner sides.⁴Those more critical of INGO and international press efficacy have found evidence that they have either no effect, a conditional effect,⁵or in some cases a negative effect⁶on human rights practices. These mixed findings reveal a lack of consensus from a scholarly perspective, even while INGOs have received recognition for their contribution to furthering human rights in target countries.⁷

We ask in this article whether the power of the pen - that is, naming and shaming - changes the behaviour of states that violate human rights. Clearly, when INGOs and the international press choose to report on a given country's human rights practices, the response from the target state matters for how 'effective' an INGO's effort is. On the flip side, INGOs are strategic actors, and as such select from a menu of advocacy techniques for a given case based on organizational calculations. We approach the analysis of state responses to INGO and press naming and shaming from the perspective of domestic institutional constraints and incentives in violator states. Our contribution addresses the differential effects that naming and shaming may have in different political regimes. While democracies and hybrid regimes - which combine democratic and authoritarian elements - might have, on the whole, better respect for human rights,⁸this does not automatically make them more responsive to INGO advocacy and media scrutiny. We argue that the effectiveness of international efforts to name and shame may be contingent on regime type, but that autocracies may actually be more receptive to INGO and media naming and shaming than non-autocracies, a grouping that combines democracies and hybrid regimes.

Our argument stands in contrast to...