Foreign Direct Investment, Human Rights, INGOs

One of the major areas of underdeveloped research within political science is the interaction between non-state actors. From an international political economy perspective, the literature has largely ignored the interaction of various non-state actors that are growing in importance, and its effects on different forms of trade. In a recently published article "Avoiding the Spotlight: Human Rights Shaming and Foreign Direct Investment" by Colin Barry, Chad Clay and Michael Flynn, they lay the foundation for examining this interaction. They examine the interaction between non-state actors (INGOs) and multinational corporations (MNCs) and the extent to which private actors' choices to invest in countries are affected by the reputational costs of doing business in those countries who have been targeted by human rights activists. In particular, they analyze how INGOs "naming and shaming" actions affect the level of FDI. Their results suggest that the naming and shaming approach by INGOs tends to reduce the amount of FDI received by developing states, thus providing evidence for INGO efforts affecting the behavior of MNCs.

While this research is certainly innovative it does leave open a couple of issues regarding the type of human rights needing to be examined. First, when focusing on foreign direct investment and human rights in general, is physical integrity rights the correct "form" of human rights abuse to look at in-depth. In particular, why is there no labor rights measure incorporated into the research design? If we are trying to determine the conditions under which multinational corporations will become concerned with a country's human rights record, it would certainly make sense that labor rights is probably the most important human rights issue to MNCs. That is, these would be the types of issues that MNCs would be cited and given numerous media attention by the international community.

As a human rights researcher from a political economy perspective, I am very excited to see the direction of our field moving down this route and examining the interactions between different non-state actors. I think these interactions will certainly reveal more of the underlying mechanisms at work in determining the conditions under which MNCs and other non-state actors choose to invest abroad.