The protection of human rights is one of those subjects defined at times by an uneasy tension between claims of conviction versus suspicion, with both practitioners and scholars weighing in.

In her provocative new book, Evidence for Hope, Kathryn Sikkink advances conviction. Her goal is to counter what she perceives as the “recent increase of pessimism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of human rights law, institutions, and movements” (p. 3). Anchored partly in evidence and partly in her own experience, her mission is to persuade skeptical publics along with intellectuals and activists who perceive a movement in crisis. “Whether on the news, in the academy, or when one talks to a member of the general public, the standard view is that all types of human rights abuses in the world are getting worse” (p. 7). Sikkink believes this is both a misperception and fuel for a growing backlash.

Both claims are easy to overplay.

It is true that the spotlight of attention from the media and NGOs is uneven, disproportionately covering some problems over others.^{Footnote 1} But unevenness cuts many ways. These organizations paint varied global pictures—some of decline, others not—and many fail miserably to report on victims and atrocities that deserve more attention. The media if anything may not always be critical enough.

Publics often know little about human rights—ignorance is a real problem in this domain—and when they do speak up, they offer inconsistent views about whether these norms and institutions matter to them or are in decline.^{Footnote 2} Public opinion on the subject is both complex and diverse.^{Footnote 3}

The broader views of scholars and intellectuals are a good deal more nuanced. Some have branded the human rights movement as at its “endtimes” or “twilight.”^{Footnote 4} But much of the scholarship—certainly the empirical flavor that is showcased—has moved on. Early strains of “it works” or “it doesn’t”^{Footnote 5} have long since evolved into fruitful efforts to uncover the conditions under which either view is justifiably grounded in reality.^{Footnote 6} That is where both the current mood and the future lie in the academy of empirical social science.

A call to data is at the center of Sikkink’s charge. A central claim is that human rights data paint a picture that “is far more positive than current pessimism suggests” (p. 141). This claim is based on the idea that the data reflect changing standards of accountability, which means that “some people may use this as evidence that the world is getting worse and, therefore, become discouraged” (p. 179).

I laud Sikkink’s call for scholars to embrace careful empirical work and methodological transparency, alongside her concerns about ideal-based comparisons, hidden causal attribution, and difficult data. With those demands for better scholarship, data, and research methodology, Sikkink is pushing on a door that is already wide open and is articulating a view shared broadly by the academy of empirically driven scholars working in this domain today. New datasets, techniques, and policies of transparency and replication are the norm.

Yet it is simply too soon to conclude that the evidence supports a “bias for hope” (p. 14). At best, the mounting empirical evidence shows disagreement rooted, in part, in increasingly sophisticated and diverse modeling choices and datasets, which show improvements alongside stalemates or regression.^{Footnote 7} They show that “success” and “failure” are often conditional on factors outside the human rights movement’s control and are highly dependent on scope, context, and definition.

Data are uneven in quality and “something of a moving target.”^{Footnote 8} Yet they are not uniformly biased in strictly one-dimensional ways: the reporting problems and conditions in one location or on one type of right may present different challenges for another, making it tricky to support the book’s singular inference that skeptics are being misled into doubt. The problems with data quality and analysis are real, but the literature as a whole—led now by a new generation of highly teched-up scholars—does not point uniformly in any single direction. All “sides” in the debate, to the extent that sides even exist, can legitimately find some evidence in their corner. And for most academics working these data, identifying limitations and scope conditions to any phenomenon is not equivalent to espousing or spreading pessimism. It is the core of social science research.

Even more complicated is the fact that the entire enterprise of assessing the effects of human rights, and not just in this book, struggles with attributing cause and effect. A strength of this volume is its wide scope of coverage of a huge movement with many actors, many institutions, many goals, many stakeholders, many mechanisms, many rights, and many violations. Its grand scope makes the job of trying to attribute causality even harder. Some things seem to get better, some get worse, and some idle. The real question is why? Can any of those changes be attributed to the movement and its many actors or tools? And if so, to which parts, how, where, and why? Answers to those questions are far from settled.

Although there is not yet an empirically based bias for hope—and I hope one day there will be—there is some cause for optimism, just as there is some cause for concern. Unpacking those details will be the future charge of data-driven scholarship on human rights, which is already making headway in addressing the ever-pressing challenge of identifying not only correlations but also of linking specific causes with particular effects and demonstrating pathways and conditions under which human rights can lead to help bring about a better future.