I am grateful to Professor Johansen for his thorough and accurate account of my argument, which is no mean feat in light of its numerous moving parts and sprawling thematic coverage. His critique focuses mainly on whether the stridency of human rights advocacy should be scaled down to an aspirational status when conditions for compliance are not yet ripe. Since he calls his own theory empirical, it is appropriate to treat this as an empirical question.
He quotes the eminent historian Paul Gordon Lauren on those rights advocates who were “ridiculed” and “reviled” for their uncompromising idealism, yet “transformed the world.” But Abraham Lincoln saw another side to this story. The 1844 US Presidential election pitted an advocate of westward expansion of slavery, Democrat James Polk, against the waffling Whig Henry Clay, who sought neither abolition nor expansion. Clay was not pure enough for some Abolitionists, whose Liberty Party candidate won 3% of New York state’s popular vote. As a direct result, Polk edged out Clay in New York by 1%, garnering all the state’s electoral votes, which provided Polk’s overall margin of victory. In office, Polk launched a war on Mexico, acquiring proslavery territories and paving the way for the struggle that led to the US Civil War. As Lincoln’s postmortem noted, “by the fruit the tree is to be known” (Snyder, pp. 131–32).
We still live in a world where uncompromising rights advocacy and shaming can come at a high cost. Jamie Gruffydd-Jones’s Hostile Forces (2022) shows that the Chinese government sometimes amplifies Human Rights Watch’s criticisms that Chinese citizens would otherwise not be aware of in order to provoke a popular nationalist backlash. But he also notes that foreign criticism on some rights issues such as spousal violence and environmental degradation spurs no popular backlash because people often agree with these charges. Calculating when and whether to temper shaming hinges on an empirical question.
Even those political scientists who have been the most committed to hard-hitting human rights advocacy have come to the conclusion that effective tactics sometimes depend on feasibility. Beth Simmons shows that signing rights treaties advances the cause in countries that have somewhat independent courts and latitude for civil society activism, but otherwise not (Snyder, pp. 15, 250). The authors of The Power of Human Rights (1999) acknowledged in the follow-up Persistent Power of Human Rights (2013) that high-pressure tactics do not work very well when the target state is too strong or too weak, when abuses are decentralized, and when the illiberal population agrees with the state’s abusive policies (Snyder, pp. 15, 251). Lifelong human rights advocate Priscilla Hayner’s detailed case studies of civil war found that there really is a tradeoff between peace and justice, and she called for tempering the zeal for punishment (Snyder, pp. 102–4). Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg worried that the US public was not ready for Roe v. Wade and anticipated a politically polarizing backlash (Snyder, p. 26). Ought implies can.
“International enforcement” of human rights compliance comes with risks. NATO’s bombing of Belgrade to rein in Serbia’s repression of its Albanian minority triggered the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo residents (Snyder, pp. 46–47). The humanitarian intervention in Libya under the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect was an enforcement operation that few are eager to repeat. A prime task of any empirical theory of human rights promotion is to understand and weigh such consequences.
