Nonstate actors, such as international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and multinational corporations (MNCs), have attained an increasingly prominent role in modern world affairs. While previous research has focused on these actors' respective interactions with states, little attention has been paid to their interactions with each other. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the decisions of private actors seeking to invest abroad are affected by the reputational costs of doing business in countries publicly targeted by human rights activists. We find that ''naming and shaming'' by human rights INGOs tends to reduce the amount of foreign direct investment received by developing states, providing evidence that INGO activities affect the behavior of MNCs. An additional implication of our findings is that shaming by INGOs can impose real costs on targeted states in the form of lost investment.

No abstract

Scholarship on the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows has produced valuable insights into the role of host state characteristics and home-host relations. This study draws attention to another factor in investment decisions-the political and economic relations that home and host states maintain with third-party states. More narrowly, we focus on how investors respond to their home-state's imposition of economic sanctions against a trading partner. Greater economic integration has allowed states to use economic sanctions more frequently in recent decades. At the same time, economic sanctions are thought to have a distorting effect on global trade and financial flows as firms and governments adjust to new constraints. We argue that as firms at home in the sanctioning state respond to coercive measures against a trading partner by looking for alternative sources of profit, they will shift investments to states that can provide indirect access to the sanctioned economy. In particular, those states that are perceived as prospective sanctions-busters-major trading partners of the sanctions target or states with a history of sanctions-busting behavior-will benefit disproportionately from the misfortune of others. We test this conjecture using data on US economic sanctions and global flows of US FDI from 1966 to 2000. The findings reveal that investor decision making in part responds to political developments beyond the home-host dyad.Following the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in 1977, the US government began to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. These measures, designed to express official US disapproval of apartheid, included a ban on technology exports to South Africa's police and military. Although the sanctions had widespread popular backing, support for them was weaker among US firms with business interests in South Africa. As early as 1978, the US embassy in Pretoria was forced to inform the US State Department that, "multinationals, including US subsidiaries, are determined to undercut any sanctions action and have already made plans to camouflage their operations through subterfuges arranged with

No abstract

What determines the location of those human rights international non-governmental organization (INGO) resources found outside of the highly developed Western democracies? We draw a distinction between the bottom-up mobilization processes driving the location of human rights organization (HRO) members from the top-down strategic concerns driving where HRO leaders place permanent offices. In particular, we find that, while political opportunity structures generally increase the likelihood that a state has HRO members, it has a curvilinear influence on the number of HRO secretariats, which typically locate in areas seen as having a higher need for organizational resources. Further, while there is no clear connection between human rights abuses and HRO memberships in a state, HROs' strategic concerns lead them to place offices with reference to both local and neighborhood "need"-in other words, levels of repression.Colin M. Barry is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma. His research concerns the politics of globalization, focusing in particular on nonstate actors and the sociopolitical ramifications of their transnational activities. His work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Peace Research.Sam R. Bell is an assistant professor of political science at Kansas State University. His work focuses on the role of information diffusion, transparency, and non-governmental organizations on different international security and human security outcomes.