Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks argue in Socializing States that human rights change in global affairs is best understood as a process of acculturation, rather than a result of persuasion or material inducement. Embracing the world polity literature and its logic of isomorphism, the authors present a theory of acculturation which views the spread of human rights (or other) norms as a result of governments’ desire for international legitimacy rather than a substantive belief in the content of the norms or a result of material pressure exerted by powerful states. The book is part of a literature probing if international human rights norms actually improve rights enjoyment, and, if so, what processes are at work in diffusing such norms across the globe. While early scholarship had emphasized the importance of principled actors and transnational networks in putting rights issues on the global and domestic agenda, scholars have more recently put greater emphasis on processes and mechanisms of norm diffusion in order to better understand what distinguishes cases of positive human rights change from failed ones.
The book’s first part begins by defining and distinguishing three mechanisms of social influence: material inducement, persuasion, and acculturation. Subsequent chapters develop a theoretical model of acculturation and offer empirical illustrations of acculturation processes based on a review of secondary literature. Goodman and Jinks claim that recent research has shown that what is central to norm diffusion are the relations between an actor and its peers. Specifically, relevant domestic actors are regularly exposed to two types of normative influence: cognitive and social. The former is primarily expressed in the internal social-psychological experiences of conformity or nonconformity (p. 27). The latter represents the external approval or disapproval by peers that leads to public compliance, even when the actor does not believe in the norm. Actors engage in mimicry and status maximization and are driven by a desire to establish or maintain a relationship with another actor or a group of actors.
The second part of the book compares institutional design choices for human rights institutions suggested by the three mechanisms. Here, the authors claim that an acculturation perspective suggests unique policy prescriptions for membership, the precision of legal obligations, and the monitoring of agreements. International institutions should not exclude rogue states since membership facilitates the experience of social pressures. Such institutions should rely primarily on sharing best practices as a means of eliciting compliance (p. 131, table 7.1.). This also sets acculturation apart from the other two mechanisms which rely primarily on direct sanctions (material inducement) or increased issue salience driven by directly engaging governments in discussions about their human rights practices (persuasion).
The third and final part of the book focuses on how acculturation can effectively promote compliance and considers what ways institutions may effectively integrate all three processes of state socialization. Since the emphasis of an acculturation perspective is not on norm content, key concerns are in what ways a state is broadly integrated into a global community and what is the specific nature of network properties characterizing its interactions with other states (e.g., strength of ties or position in the network). An acculturation perspective suggests that material pressures or persuasive efforts will be more effective if these relational factors are systematically taken into account.
The book impresses with conceptual clarity and presents an ambitious attempt to introduce the idea of acculturation as a distinct mechanism of how human rights norms diffuse from the international to the domestic levels. While not original, the claim that social relations are important to understanding normative change allows the authors to import key insights of the world polity literature to explain human rights change. But this reliance on world polity frames, combined with the absence of a detailed empirical documentation of core claims, also accounts for its main limitations.
First, the book lacks a substantive empirical presentation elaborating how acculturation unfolds in the real world. Instead, the authors resort to referencing a wide range of studies which all happen to illustrate the main argument of the book. It is certainly fine to cite as much supporting evidence as possible, but a stronger case for acculturation would have emerged from either presenting case studies or from discussing more systematically in what ways the authors would interpret countervailing evidence to their perspective. Take for example their claims that the United States was merely an “enactor of international scripts” when it embraced racial equality in the 20th century (p. 81). Or consider the more recent right to food campaign in India and the mobilization for affordable anti-retroviral drugs in Africa. Each of these cases is imminently relevant to the arguments advanced by Goodman and Jinks, but they all add a lot more complexity with regard to the role of domestic politics or transnational actors than the world polity perspective concedes. For the case of the United States, consider the importance of both the emerging Cold War competition and the mobilization of the domestic civil rights movement. The cases of India and HIV/AIDS suggest that much of the action in this field is about selecting what rights and which groups get attention—again something not explained within a world polity framework. The point here is not to argue that acculturation doesn’t matter, but to show that a more in-depth discussion of any such cases would have provided a more convincing basis for deriving theoretical claims than the selective presentation of supportive evidence only.
A second and related problem imported with the world polity perspective is the lack of attention to the role of agency as an autonomous force. Not only are NGOs and civil society “dispensable” (p. 157), but actors are generally reduced to being passive respondents to international norms and social pressures. Goodman and Jinks discuss in what ways civil society groups may be constituted and empowered by the adoption of international scripts (p. 144–150 and p. 157–159), but ignore the complexities of these global-local interactions. Scholars in anthropology and other disciplines have for some time traced not only the tensions between global and local norms, but offered many empirical examples describing how global scripts are subverted or resisted. In addition, studies focused on the detrimental effects of external support for domestic activism make a strong case for taking agency and strategies more seriously than Goodman and Jinks do when repeatedly resorting to the idea of “decoupling” as a catch-all phrase to cover a wide range of gaps between espoused values and local practices. The singular focus on how international scripts constitute actors puts this book behind the state of the art when considering the significant interdisciplinary progress investigating global-local interactions.
A final issue arises from the limited dynamism inherent in the acculturation perspective, especially compared to persuasion-based socialization theories. While the book identifies levels of institutionalization or network features as relevant to explaining variation in acculturation results, it also paints the process as essentially applicable across time and space. Neither do the authors consider major differences between today’s and earlier periods of global integration, nor does their model make room for substantial changes in motives over time. In contrast, a more persuasion-based approach represented, for example, by the “spiral model” developed in The Power of Human Rights (ed. by Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, 1999) explores more elaborately how specific strategies applied by a norm sender may affect beliefs of the target. Acculturation can then simply be understood as a step along a government’s shift away from outright denial of violations towards formal acceptance and subsequent compliance. Persuasion-based arguments consider the possibility that actors’ motives substantially change over time, including from a mere concern for social status to a more substantial belief in the norm content. While such a successful process of norm compliance may be a lot more rare than scholars of human rights change have long assumed, a framework allowing for changing motives and beliefs takes the role of agency more seriously and better facilitates empirical investigations of what actually motivates responses to human rights pressures. The book’s core contribution is to focus less attention on the norms themselves and more on the importance of the social context. Being for human rights is one thing, but knowing how to effectively promote them raises not just questions about what constitutes a good policy at the local level, but also what types of relations need to be put in place to motivate the target. This latter agenda is where Goodman and Jinks make their most important contributions.
