Expediency of the angels

National Interest, The, March-April, 2009 by Suzanne Katzenstein, Jack Snyder

The Obama administration will face human-rights issues at every turn in confronting terrorism, insurgency and ethnic cleansing along the arc of crisis from South Asia to Sudan. To tackle these strategic challenges as well as chronic rights abuses, the new administration and nongovernmental advocacy groups need a new, more pragmatic approach.

In the past, the strategies of neoconservatives and liberal activists have been long on the rhetoric of freedom and rights, but have fallen short on results. Wary of overpromising, the U.S. public has become skeptical about promoting American ideals abroad. Yet the real lesson of these setbacks should not be to abandon idealistic goals, but to pursue them in more pragmatic ways. Without developing a more effective human-rights policy, the United States will neither recover its tarnished reputation nor accomplish its strategic goals.

Some human-rights activists have begun to learn this lesson in their own work. While pronouncements from the headquarters of advocacy organizations still sound doctrinaire, pragmatists in the field are developing eclectic outcome-oriented approaches that take into account the power of local actors and the need to tailor tactics to local circumstances. Both realists and idealists should find value in these effective approaches, which can help restore America's political standing in the world while also doing good.

Over the past two decades, traditional human-rights activists have placed human-rights issues on the international agenda in quite dramatic fashion, but a hefty stack of statistical studies suggests that they have done only a little to improve actual situations on the ground. Treaty signing, legal accountability and "naming and shaming" have had little demonstrable positive effect, and sometimes they even backfire. Where human rights have improved, it is mainly because wars have ended or democracy has been successfully consolidated, not because of human-rights activism.

Rights advocates who have targeted diffuse, embedded practices like child labor and female genital cutting have run into stiff resistance, even from those they seek to help. Advocates focusing on states' violations have hardly fared better. The much-vaunted International Criminal Court has not delivered much justice or deterrence anywhere. And though everyone pledged "never again" after the Rwandan genocide, the response to atrocities in Darfur and eastern Congo has been diffident and ineffectual.

In response to these disappointments, a new approach is emerging. Turning human-rights conventional wisdom on its head, pragmatists argue that amnesties for rights abusers, material inducements for potential peace-deal breakers and dialogues based on local morality can be effective; criminalizing abuses and universalizing Western standards often fail. These new tactics strive to be realistic about power relations, the state's ability to actually implement change, the cultural resources of those that oppose rights reform and the social dilemmas that trap communities in habits of abuse.

This style of engagement fits well with the current climate of U.S. public opinion, which remains committed to human-rights ideals but has become wary of pushing this agenda with unreflective zeal. According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Global Views 2008 survey, a plurality of U.S. public opinion has downgraded "promoting and defending human rights" from a "very important" to a "somewhat important" goal; a majority wants to "move cautiously," rather than either "aggressively" or "slowly" in promoting human rights abroad. Refecting this mood of measured idealism, one of the few points of agreement in the second presidential debate was that the United States should try to prevent genocide, but that Washington must also be realistic about the constraints it faces.

But being realistic does not mean that states should be left alone to do whatever they want to their citizens. Nor does it mean that states should discard moral approaches altogether in favor of one-sided strategies of material incentives and pressures. Instead, building on a review of the evidence of what works in shaping human-rights outcomes, we make the case for using a range of material, informational, moral and legal tools, all adapted to fit the specific cultural, economic and political contexts sustaining particular patterns of abuse.

Efforts to improve human rights are often frustrated by two kinds of social dilemmas. First, spoilers (whose social position depends on the perpetuation of abuses) can stymie rights-reform movements in order to preserve their power. Second, abuses are sometimes so engrained in local social practices that a society can fall into a perverse-equilibrium trap (a situation where individual members of a community cannot abandon abusive practices unless everyone changes their behavior at the same time). Human-rights interventions fail when their tactics are not designed to outmaneuver these two very strong forces.