A bold new perspective on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement
When a government violates the rights of its citizens, the international community can respond by exerting moral pressure and urging reform. Yet many of the most egregious violations appear to go unpunished. In many cases, shaming not only fails to induce compliance but also incites a backlash, provoking resistance and worsening human rights practices. The Geopolitics of Shaming presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.
Drawing on a wide range of evidence-from large-scale cross-national data to original survey experiments and detailed case studies-Rochelle Terman shows how human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relat
