1. What is the name of the article and what are its coordinates?

Zoltán I. Búzás and Lotem Bassan-Nygate. 2024. “Race, shaming, and international human rights.” American Journal of Political Science 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12938

2. What’s the argument?

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human-rights organization spend a lot of time publicly criticizing governments that violate human rights. This kind of “shaming” sometimes mobilizes public opinion against perpetrators, but it doesn’t always work, and it can have downsides. Shaming particular states can fuel racism; governments can politically insulate themselves from criticism by portraying it, accurately or not, as racist.

We find that human-rights organizations can effectively counter these accusations by incorporating anti-racist language into the rhetoric that they use to “name and shame” governments that violate human rights.

3. Why should we care?

Human-rights organizations and governments frequently engage in racially infused exchanges. In 2022, for example, Amnesty International labeled Israel an “apartheid state” and Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused Amnesty of anti-Semitism. Qatar pushed back against criticisms during the 2022 World Cup by calling them racist. The Chinese government employed its mouthpiece, the Global Times, to condemn criticisms by Human Rights Watch as “anti-China.”

In an effort to counter these attacks, human-rights organizations have started incorporating anti-racist cues into their rhetoric; they explicitly denounce racism and specify that their criticisms target governments—not races, ethnicities, or nationalities.

Does shaming appear racist or fuel racism against diasporas? Do anti-racist cues lower the actual or perceived racism of shaming? Can a shamed state blunt its critics by accusing them of racism? The answers to these questions matter a great deal for human-rights accountability, racism, and the reputation of organizations that try to hold states accountable.

4. Why will we find the article persuasive?

We conducted eleven interviews with prominent current and former human rights leaders. We tested our hypotheses in two survey experiments, involving a total of 6,739 U.S. respondents. Among other things, we varied the identity of the critic (Amnesty International or a generic human-rights organization), the identity of the target (Israel or China), the nature of shaming (whether it included a denunciation of racism), and the response from the target (no response, a response that accused the shamer of racism, or a response that accused the shamer of misinformation).

We find that employing shaming against the governments of Israel and China led to reduced U.S. public support for these governments. However, contrary to our expectations, shaming did not seem to incite racism toward associated diasporas. Nonetheless, respondents still perceived shaming as racist. Our second main finding pointed toward a solution: when a human-rights organization’s shaming included a denunciation of racism, respondents perceived it as less racist. Lastly, shamed governments can buy back some, but not all, support lost to shaming.

5. Why did you decide to write it in the first place?

We have been intrigued by public debates that center on human-rights shaming and racism. These debates tend to be very passionate, but there is not a lot of evidence one way or another. We wanted to bring more evidence to these heated and timely conversations.

6. What would you most like to change about the piece, and why?

We employ new methodological tools to suggest that our findings would likely hold outside of the United States. But we would have liked to have administered the experiment in other countries, particularly Germany and South Africa, to see if we got different results.

7. How much difficulty did you have getting the piece accepted?

The American Journal of Political Science was the second journal to review the paper, but we had a great experience there with the editors and referees.