Diffusion Across Political Systems: The Global Spread of National Human Rights Institutions

Abstract

This article examines the proliferation of national human rights institutions (NHRIs) and seeks to explain the drivers of this institutional innovation across contrasting political regimes. This article suggests that the NHRI phenomenon can be attributed to increasingly sophisticated international organizational platforms and three distinct, but complementary, mechanisms of diffusion: (1) coercion, (2) acculturation, and (3) persuasion. The article argues that a powerful international process of diffusion is at work and NHRIs are no longer the exclusive preserve of liberal democratic regimes. Instead NHRIs have diffused to a wide range of political systems, subjecting these human rights institutions to new and often competing demands and expectations.

Declining willingness to fight for one’s country

“…These changes have been accompanied by increasing emphasis on human rights and the spread of democracy (Huntington, 1991;Markoff & White, 2009;Pegram, 2010). For the past two centuries, democracy has become increasingly widespread -with each surge being followed by a decline, but with a strong upward longterm trend.…”

A Tale of Two Trends: Democracy and Human Rights, 1981–2010

“…To be sure, human rights principles have proliferated across the world in recent years (Pegram 2010), and past studies find that IGOs (Greenhill 2010) andINGOs (HafnerBurton andTsutsui 2005;Powell and Staton 2009) positively affect a country's human rights record. However, more recent studies suggest that international organizations may not play a significant role (R. Clark 2010;Cole 2012aCole , 2012bCole and Ramirez 2013).…”

“…At the same time, human rights agreements have proliferated across the world (Cole 2005;R. Clark 2010;Pegram 2010), signaling a growing effort by the international community to address human rights violations (Hafner-Burton 2008). Moreover, previous studies consistently show that democracy positively affects human rights practices (Hafner-Burton 2005;Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005;R.…”

Global Human Rights Governance and Orchestration: National Human Rights Institutions as Intermediaries

“…Scholars have begun to enhance the conceptual precision around orchestration as well as probe the concept as a dependent variable (i.e. the conditions under which it emerges) and as an independent variable in explaining how IGOs as orchestrators may guide and shape the behaviour of states (Abbott et al 2014, various (Cardenas, 2003;Pegram, 2010;Kim, 2013), the significance of this new class of formal organisation for human rights governance is still under-theorised and not well understood. 2 To generate insight into the application of orchestration for human rights governance, we would want to identify a domain where the orchestrator addresses the target indirectly through soft (i.e.…”