Field of Dreams: The Chimeric Connection of Human Rights and Democracy Promotion

• In Event: Protecting Human Rights and Promoting Democracy: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Human rights and democracy are closely related liberal ideals. They are often intertwined in international law, with many foundational human rights texts explicitly emphasizing the importance of democracy and elections. They are also closely related in practice, as democracies are more likely than non-democracies to respect human rights. Yet the transnational fields of human rights protection and democracy promotion are largely separate in the United States and, albeit to a lesser extent, in Western Europe. Why did a boundary between the two fields emerge, and why has it persisted? More broadly, what might the disconnect between human rights and democracy promotion tell us about how fields in global governance emerge and evolve?

Our analysis finds that, when defining the content of their work, actors in human rights and democracy promotion have constructed and policed the boundaries of their fields in direct response to one another. This co-emergence yielded two very different liberal projects – one field more cosmopolitan in origin and orientation (human rights), and one field more national in origin and orientation (democracy promotion). The field of human rights emerged in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as a project that sought to transcend Cold War politics. Over time, the field came to focus on the construction and implementation of international law to protect individual rights. The democracy promotion field emerged in the 1980s in the United States. Its later orientation remained national, in two senses: the field accepts the Wilsonian view that democratic transformations can align with the national interests of states promoters, and its work targets national-level institutions and practices. We thus argue that leading human rights organizations engaged in boundary policing vis-à-vis democracy promotion when it emerged in the 1980s because they saw it as a threat. Events during this time were critical for the emergence of this boundary, although it had earlier roots and later developments.

Our analysis of the boundary between the fields of human rights and democracy promotion contributes to ongoing debates about the U.S. human rights movement. Prominent studies have recently characterized the movement as being narrowly focused on political rights and civil liberties at the expense of economic and social considerations. We, in contrast, focus on how the human rights movement policed its boundary on the right by excluding many aspects of democracy promotion that might otherwise be compatible with even a narrow focus on political rights and civil liberties.

Our study also has broader implications since accurately identifying the boundaries of fields is essential to descriptive and causal inferences about transnational actors in world politics. As boundaries harden, they inform the identities and tactics of dominant actors, patterns of relations among them, and the availability of external resources. Identifying these boundaries is especially important as scholars turn towards examining entire populations of organization. Yet how do we know which actors constitute the fields of climate change, humanitarianism, or human rights? It is often not enough to look at the words that actors use to describe their work, since organizations will coopt a field’s language while remaining outside of it. Ultimately, actors’ views of proximate fields are as important as their own self-conceptions in informing the content of fields in global governance.

Authors

• Sarah S. Stroup, Middlebury College

• Sarah S. Bush, Yale University