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9. Contested Norms and Human Rights Change
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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9 Contested Norms and Human Rights Change This book started with a series of questions, most importantly: Why do governments routinely violate the most basic norms of human • rights? Why do they change their practices? • Why do they sometimes get away with the most flagrant human rights • violations? Rational institutionalist approaches to international relations emphasize that human rights violations result, most importantly, from inadequate or weak international enforcement mechanisms that do not sufficiently monitor and constrain governments. Governments change their practice when the costs of repression outweigh their benefits. Constructivist approaches emphasize the role of intersubjective normative understandings and the ways that constructions about reality influence the interests and identities of states or groups within the state. The mobilization of Western states and domestic civil society can pressure governments to change their policy. To explain continuing human rights violations, they highlight three factors, among others , incomplete processes of international norm socialization, the absence or weakness of civil society actors or transnational advocacy networks as effective safeguard for abuses, and the enduring misfit between international and domestic norms. This book emphasizes normative contestation. Transnational human rights advocacy influenced the Indonesian and Philippine states’ human rights policies in unexpected ways. It challenged 258 Chapter 9 authoritarian governments that had backing from strategic-military allies. Advocacy brought human rights on a domestic agenda and proved to be an effective tool to constrain the powerful militaries’ role in the Philippines and Indonesia. In both countries, transnational advocacy contributed to the demise of authoritarian rule. But as we record these influences, the Indonesian and Philippine governments suppressed human rights concerns after regime changes from authoritarian to democratic governments and after both political elites and domestic societies had experienced an extensive socialization process during the s (the Philippines) and the s (Indonesia) (Jetschke ; Risse and Ropp : ). In the s, Indonesia’s Suharto effectively managed to deflect transnational human rights pressures despite considerable transnational and domestic mobilization. These governments could stop significant transnational mobilization, but also had to submit to human rights pressures. I have argued in this book that some states can evade pressures for human rights change even when the conditions are present that we usually associate with changes of policies and improvements of human rights practices: States had transited from authoritarian rule to a more democratic • system. They were still on an international human rights agenda, or transna- • tional advocacy networks still existed. Governments were committed to human rights. • Transnational advocacy had already achieved important conces- • sions from authoritarian governments, which should have facilitated mobilization. The empirical case studies in this book support the proposition that arguments and discourse matter in human rights advocacy and campaigns. An important rhetorical weapon of activists and international human rights organizations in their encounters with governments were good arguments seeking to invalidate government’s accounts for human rights violations. Interested audiences consisting of civil society groups in other states, individuals in state departments, and representatives of international organizations listened carefully to and understood what these actors said to each other. Their dialogue was mediated through media who critically evaluated statements. Because the outcome of these dialogues was consequential, actors rightly devoted time and attention to them. [3.236.18.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:52 GMT) Contested Norms and Human Rights Change 259 My three main findings in this book relate to this point. First, I have shown that both the process through which governments were pressured and decided to change their human rights practice as well as the process through which they restrict human rights guarantees and the political space for human rights monitors can be social. These decisions were embedded in transnational discourses that engaged human rights organizations, international organizations , and governments. It was in these discourses that all the parties worked out their identities, roles, and courses of action. They legitimated the actions of actors, a crucial factor in modern democratic polities. State governments initially did not decide to violate human rights in a social vacuum, making an autonomous choice primarily determined by their own preferences to stay in power. Governments spent a great deal of time justifying their policies to audiences and seeking their support. They did so in the expectation that their justifications for curtailing human rights might be accepted. They were not forced into a process of rhetorical self-entrapment by the “pressure of a fully mobilized domestic and transnational network” (Risse and Ropp : ), they also had an intrinsic motivation to account for their behavior. Their decisions aimed at receiving...