Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: Jubilee 2000, Debt Relief, and Moral Action in International Politics

Abstract

Do states and decision‐makers ever act for moral reasons? And if they do, is it only when it is convenient or relatively costless for them to do so? A number of advocacy movements—on developing country debt relief, climate change, landmines, and other issues—emerged in the 1990s to ask decision‐makers to make foreign policy decisions on that basis. The primary advocates were motivated not by their own material interests but broader notions of right and wrong. What contributes to the domestic acceptance of these moral commitments? Why do some advocacy efforts succeed where others fail? Through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for developing country debt relief, this article offers an account of persuasion based on strategic framing by advocates to get the attention of decision‐makers. Such strategic but not narrowly self‐interested activity allows weak actors to leverage existing value and/or ideational traditions to build broader political coalitions. This article, through case studies of debt relief in the United States and Japan, also links the emerging literature on strategic framing to the domestic institutional context and the ways veto players or “policy gatekeepers” evaluate trade‐offs between costs and values.

Global governance behind closed doors: The IMF boardroom, the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, and the intersection of material power and norm stabilisation in global politics

“…28 Unsurprisingly, when multilateral debt relief was operationalized, the bulk of the IMF's contribution to the 1999 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and the 2005 Multilateral Debt 26 According to their interpretation, gold sales would have to flow into the Fund's general lending resources, and as such could not be channelled back to individual states on the basis of contributions to the ESAF Trust. 27 For detailed overviews of the role of NGOs in the extension of multilateral debt relief, see Broome (2009) and Busby (2007). 28 As Meltzer (2011) has recently argued, with the Fund's current burst in lending activity the relationship between its resources and sovereign default could over the medium term again become a key issue in the global economy.…”

Public Discourse on Human Trafficking in International Issue Arenas

“…A value frame thus connects a certain social issue with established values that support one view on the issue [34]. Busby [35] states that to persuade policy actors to become involved in the decision-making process, advocacy frameworks should include values that have a wide societal appeal and personal relevance for the public. Along these lines, Shen and Edwards [36] argue that people bring their own mental frameworks and existing values into the coding process, which adds to the dynamic and selective process of framing.…”

“…Based on the results, the EP, Amnesty and HRW gave examples of the strong causality between other issues and trafficking, building communicative frames around the causes and effects, while adding factual but at the same time emotional narratives about how victims are mistreated. This invites people to see such connections, subsequently adding issue salience [34,35,56]. The actors used naming−shaming frames to point to those responsible for illegal acts or those who refrain from corrective action.…”

The political economy of international organizations

“…Obviously this covers a broad spectrum of actors within which important differences exist. According to Busby (2007), for instance, NGOs and advocacy networks are primarily motivated by normative goals and broad notions of right and wrong rather that the special, material self-interests of business lobbies and labor unions (see also Sikkink 1998, Werker andAhmed 2008). Parts of the literature treat NGOs and special interest groups separately.…”