The Other Side of Shame: How the Global South Advances Human Rights

Human rights scholarship has systematically researched and established a prominent mechanism by which states promote human rights. They do so by shaming states that fail to meet global human rights standards, exposing in front of a global audience possible misbehavior and indicating concrete measures to improve the human rights situation in a country. Often aided by transnational civil society organizations, the “naming and shaming” mechanism is the dominant way of pushing human rights and doing human rights work in world politics. What has received less attention, however, is a growing secular trend where more and more states seem to commend other states for their human rights achievements, rather than criticizing them. This trend is common among countries from the “Global South”, but also spills over to the “Global North”. What drives this trend? Do we observe a new form of promoting human rights, couched in a logic of targeted encouragement, or does this trend show a declining concern for effective human rights implementation, eliminating reputational costs for countries that are being praised for their human rights records, even if problems remain? To shed light on these questions, this paper investigates what we conceptualize as “the other side of shame”: persistent patterns of praise in which states laud the human rights advancements of other states rather than criticizing their human rights violations. In particular, we analyze who praises whom and for what reason. We argue that praise is not only a reflection of actually existing empirical trends (although at times it might be) within specific countries. Instead, it is a distinct strategy to (1) intervene in ongoing contestations over prioritization of certain rights over other (e.g. social and economic over civil and political rights, or vice versa) and (2) advance contested interpretations of specific rights. We therefore expect that whether states praise, depends on the specific rights involved and the ideological proximity between the one who praises and the praised. To systematically examine our argument, we leverage data from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Using the recommendations made during the review of states’ human rights records, we create novel data by measuring the extent of praise entailed in the text and wording of recommendations. We combine the cross-sectional time-series data on the extent of praise (and shaming) with information on the ideological proximity between countries and the kind of human rights involved. Using two-way fixed effects models, we fit linear regressions, controlling for geopolitical similarity, economic dependence, and further important confounders. Preliminary results suggest that praise is a) a popular mechanism of advancing certain human rights employed mostly by countries from the “Global South” and b) that ideological proximity drives the likelihood of praise.