14 - Changing hearts and minds

Summary

How does the “power of human rights” affect private wrongs – violations generated by non-state actors? Private actors with delegated authority, such as families, employers and religious communities, are increasingly recognized as potential human rights violators and subject to international campaigns – but not yet to consistent governance. Many modern states allow designated categories of private actors to exercise physical and even legal control over dependent members such as women, children and employees, and the exercise of such control may often violate international human rights standards of life, liberty and bodily integrity – even in states that normally guarantee protection from state abuse of such rights to their citizens in the public sphere. As a constructivist perspective suggests, transnational campaigns against private wrongs such as violence against women rely on a combination of logics of persuasion and institutionalization, with limited availability of coercion and incentives. This chapter will analyze a strikingly similar pattern of norm change through socialization in states and international organizations in the “hard case” of sexual politics, where male elites and social institutions face no incentives or coercion to change gendered patterns of subjugation. Yet immigration-weary states provide gender-based asylum and gender-neutral professional organizations lobby international organizations to delegitimize female genital mutilation (FGM). This is a story of the move from commitment to compliance; as norms change “from above and below,” the state struggles to find purchase and leverage in authority structures, including both the state and other sectors of civil society.

In each case, communicative action and civil society movements have shifted hearts and minds to contest private wrongs and extend international standards to demand state accountability for the protection of all citizens. While such persuasion and social pressure can elicit commitment, as the amplified spiral model would predict, progress from such prescriptive commitment to compliance relies heavily on the degree of centralization and control of the decision-maker, complicating redress for private wrongs more than state-sponsored abuse.