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.

21st Century Plastic People of the Universe

From October but I've just seen it. Immediately banned in China, of course. Background here. More here. If you don't "get" the title of this post see here and here.

May the ironic mind always triumph over the literal, and may humor forever overcome the humorless. Live as if you were free.

UNC Everywhere

Layna Mosley, one of our IR profs, has a very good op-ed in the NY Times that summarizes some of her recent research on the effect of international trade on labor rights.* Many would be surprised by the results of this work. Gist:

There is, however, a more general way in which trade agreements — and the economic ties they generate — benefit workers in developing nations. As Colombia and Panama expand their trade relationships with the United States, workers stand to gain more than just the job creation and higher wages that often come with expanded trade. Research I conducted over the last several years with the political scientists Brian Greenhill and Aseem Prakash suggests that trade with developed nations helps developing countries expand labor rights themselves.

Why? International trade gives producers incentives to meet the standards of their export markets. When developing nations export more to countries with better labor standards, their labor rights laws and practices tend to improve. Our findings, which are based on newly collected measures of labor rights around the world, demonstrate a “California effect” on workers’ rights, in which exporting nations are influenced by the labor rights conditions that prevail in their main trading partners.

Read the whole thing.

*I guess Layna didn't want to get shown-up by her husband, UNC Prof Andy Reynolds, who recently had an op-ed on Libya in the News and Observer.

This Week in "The World Is Messy"

Apparently no general theorizing is allowed. From the new Journal of Politics:

Estimating the Effects of Human Rights Treaties on State Behavior

Daniel W. Hill Jr

Abstract

Though research suggests that international regimes that coordinate economic and security policy can alter state behavior, research examining the effect of human rights treaties on state behavior has found that these agreements do little to curb repressive practices. However, those studies neglect to account for the fact that several of the state-level characteristics which are known to affect repressive practices also influence the likelihood of a state making a formal commitment to the human rights regime. States that commit and states that do not are likely to have different domestic institutional features. Systematic heterogeneity across ratifiers and nonratifiers makes it difficult to infer the level of repression that would have been observed in a state had it not committed to the treaty in question. This paper employs matching techniques that address this problem and allow for more valid inferences about the effects of human rights treaties on repressive practices. The impact of human rights treaties is examined in the context of three of the five core UN human rights treaties. The results are quite interesting; ratification of the CAT and, to a lesser extent, the ICCPR is associated with reduced respect for physical integrity rights while ratification of the CEDAW has a positive impact on observance of women’s rights. These findings suggest that more treaty-specific theory building is needed.

(emphasis added)

Ungated pdf here. I'm buried under a pile of exams that need to be graded, so I haven't had a chance to read this yet, but my first thought is: What about the badasses?

Today's Lesson in Cognitive Dissonance

Blatent:

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vowed to keep dismantling illegal immigrant camps and rejected complaints that the French authorities were racist and deliberately targeted the Roma for deportation.

Right. And West Bank settlers aren't deliberately targeting Palestinians, and Arizona lawmakers aren't deliberating targeting Mexicans, and Italy isn't deliberately targeting gypsies, and France's Burkha ban isn't targeting Muslims, and etc.

Hell Freezes Over

I completely agree with Fidel Castro about this.

The Problem with Turkey

Johann Hari reports on an American journalist jailed in Turkey for reporting on human rights abuses against the Kurds:

The excellent young American journalist Jake Hess - who is a good friend of mine - has just been imprisoned in Turkey in extremely worrying circumstances. Hess has been factually reporting from Southern Turkey for over a year now on way the Kurdish civilian population is being treated.

Here is the article for which Hess was arrested.

This is only the most recent in a disturbing trend in Turkey of silencing dissidents and oppressing minority groups. Dani Rodrik recently wrote about the troublesome trials of former military officers, and questioned whether Turkey can still be referred to as a secular democracy.

Both Hari and Rodrik might be accused of bias -- Hari because of his friendship with Hess, and Rodrik because one of the former military leaders is his father-in-law -- but as these cases increase in frequency and severity hope begins to wane that Turkey will continue to develop into a strong, secular, democracy. Obviously things are not yet decided, but the recent history is grim.

I'm passing this along without comment, except to say that this Serbian kid is pretty awesome.

(via Arta Osmanaj)

Vreeland on the "Bad Ass" Theory of Dictators and Human Rights Agreements

Henry Farrell passes along the welcome news that James Vreeland has a blog, which is now in my daily rotation. The first substantive post discusses Rosendorff and Hollyer's "bad ass" theory of why dictators sign on to human rights agreements that they know they will violate:

So, if a dictator enters into the CAT, he better be darn sure that he will never fall from power. And this is precisely the point. He is sending a signal to his domestic audience that he intends on doing whatever is necessary to hold on to power, and he's quite confident in his ability to survive in office. Only the strongest resolve dictators will take such a step. Soft dictators can't rist faking it - if they sign the CAT and lose their grip on power, they're libel to end up in the slammer. So the signal the tough dictators send is unambiguous, and might even serve to quite opposition, who realize that resistance is futile.

A non-gated pdf of the article he's discussing is here, and Eric Voeten discussed it here. The upshot is that signing on to international agreements like the Convention Against Torture (CAT) incurs costs for leaders, which sends a credible signal to domestic audiences that they aren't going anywhere.

I agree with everyone that this is an interesting, creative theory. My first reaction to hearing about the theory was this: if the logic is right, then the domestic audience should recognize the signal as credible and thus we should see dissident movements, and thus the torture intended to combat them, dry up. In fact, the authors do find such an effect: torture continues in signing states, but seems to decrease after signing the CAT. They also find that dictators who sign the CAT stay in power longer than those who don't.

I haven't had time to fully digest the model, but I like what I've seen so far.

Hearts and Minds

The Al Jazeera cameraman who was detained by American serviceman in Afghanistan in 2001, and held without charges for seven years before being released, is back on the air:

Among Al Jazeera’s viewers in the Arab world since the 9/11 attacks, perhaps nothing has damaged perceptions of America more than Guantánamo Bay. For that reason, Mr. Hajj, who did a six-part series on the prison after his release, is a potent weapon for the network, which does not always strive for journalistic objectivity on the subject of his treatment. In an interview, Ahmed Sheikh, the editor in chief of Al Jazeera, called Mr. Hajj “one of the victims of the human rights atrocities committed by the ex-U.S. administration.”

But Mr. Hajj has not restricted himself to Guantánamo and his own incarceration. He has expanded the network’s coverage of other rights issues, including press freedom in Iraq, Palestinians in Israeli prisons and the implications of the USA Patriot Act. On a Wednesday morning in mid-August, Mr. Hajj pushed Al Jazeera’s news desk to cover a hunger strike by political prisoners in Jordan, and he happily pointed to a nearby television when the Jordan news scrolled on the bottom of the screen.

Nor has his experience radicalized him: he said that, despite his upbringing in a violent and often repressive country and his experience in detention, he maintained a sustaining belief in democracy and the rule of law.

On the one hand, this is clear an embarrassment for the United States. And at this point only the most vehemently blind defenders of the U.S. would argue that the U.S. hadn't violated human rights on numerous occasions, including this one. On the other hand, Mr. Hajj has taken the platform that his imprisonment has given him and used it to decry human rights violations in general, not just the Bush administration in particular (although he's understandably focused on the latter).

On the other hand, these are the kinds of people that should give us hope. Mr. Hajj's story should embarrass Americans, who are still having trouble acknowledging their recent sins. But it should also embarrass those who claim that radicalization is result of -- or reaction to -- American foreign policy. As Mr. Hajj has shown, another response is to support freedom of the press and universal human rights. In other words, to support the same values and principles that the U.S. stands for. Perhaps it's ironic, but by violating these norms the U.S. may have done more to strengthen them than they could have otherwise.

Quote(s) of the Day

From Copenhagen. Mugabe:

Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing threat of climate change?

Chavez:

If the climate was a bank, they would have already saved it.

Fair play on the last point, although criticizing governments for being active in their domestic economies is a strange complaint from Hugo. There's more at the link, and Ahmadinejad is on the schedule tomorrow.

Question: how seriously should we take these sorts of complaints? It's a logical fallacy to dispute an argument based on the character of the speaker, but still (to quote HST): do we gotta take guff from these swine? Especially when their nations' biggest industries are exports of carbon-emitting fossil fuels to the Northern economies they bemoan.

(ht: KPC)

The Diffusion of Labor Rights

The newest issue of the American Political Science Review includes an article by UNC's own Layna Mosley (with Brian Greenhill and Aseem Prakash), "Trade-based Diffusion of Labor Rights: A Panel Study, 1986-2002." An ungated version is here. The article argues that there is a "California Effect" for labor rights that is somewhat similar to the effect on environmental policy. The abstract:

This article investigates the nature of the linkages between trade and labor rights in developing countries. Specifically, we hypothesize that a serves to transmit superior labor standards from importing to exporting countries, in a manner similar to the transmission of environmental standards. We maintain that, all else being equal, the labor standards of a given country are influenced not by its overall level of trade openness, but by the labor standards of its trading partners. We evaluate our hypothesis using a panel of 90 developing countries over the period 1986-2002, and we separately examine the extent to which the labor laws and the actual labor practices of the countries are influenced by those of their export destinations. We find that strong legal protections of collective labor rights in a country's export destinations are associated with more stringent labor laws in the exporting country. This California effect finding is, however, weaker in the context of labor rights practices, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between formal legislation and actual implementation of labor rights.

One question is whether the divergence between law and practice narrows over time. The study gives some evidence for that: all the signs are positive, and the third-year lag for the effect of bilateral trade context on practices is statistically significant even though the effect is insignificant at lags 1 and 2. Clearly, more work is necessary, and longer time horizons may be needed to truly observe any "reverse decay" effects of law on practice. If such are effects are found, it may provide evidence that including labor standards in trade agreements can have a positive effect.

Either way, this study strikes another tentative blow against "race to the bottom" arguments.

Brad DeLong Spoke Truth and Wisdom in 2003

And he reminds us today. Back then he was happy to espouse certain conservative traits which he hasn't recanted:

I begin from a different point, from the observations that we Americans alive today are all the recipients of an extraordinary and unmerited gift, an inheritance of institutions, principles, and organizations that is without peer anywhere on the world today and that is of inestimable value. We aren't independent liberal individuals making a social contract in the rational light of Enlightenment Reason. Instead, we are heirs who have received an enormous inheritance from our predecessors. As Burke wrote, we "claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity--as an estate specially belonging to the people." It's not a contract, or if it is a contract it is not one just between those alive today. Again, as Burke puts it, if you are to think of a social contract you have to recognize that it is not "a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

The rest of the post is more partisan, so your mileage may vary, but I think all of it is very good.

I should once again reiterate that this has major implications for immigration policy, which I consider to be the greatest civil rights issue of our day.

A Kid Beats the NY Times, AP, & Reuters While Sitting in Her Pajamas in Her Parents' Basement

The wonderful Amanda Taub of the wonderful Wronging Rights discovers that the NY Times, Associated Press, and Reuters were (likely) taken in by a hoax perpetrated by a fictional character with ties to a Darfuri rebel leader. The story is phenomenal, and comes in three parts:

Part I: Who Is Abu Sharati, and Why Am I the Only One Asking That Question?

Part II: Who Is Abu Sharati, and Why Is the Mainstream Media Quoting Him Without a Good Answer to That Question?

Part III: Who Is Abu Sharati, and Does It Even Matter (Yes. Yes, It Does)

Please read the whole thing.

(The reference to pajamas and basements comes from this).