Protecting Human Rights and Promoting Democracy: Challenges and Opportunities

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

According to many observers, we are in a moment of democratic decline. There is evidence of a backlash to civil society and human rights in many world regions. Within that context, this panel brings together four papers that push forward our understanding of the challenges and opportunities of global efforts to protect human rights and promote democracy.

In the first paper, Paul Nelson explores how a growing attention to human rights in the development has influenced the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of goals adopted by world leaders at the United Nations in 2015. He argues that rights-based approaches to development have helped shift global policy attention to the issue of access to productive assets, such as land, capital, labor rights, and energy. In the second paper, Sarah Bush and Sarah Stroup share Nelson’s interest in how the human rights field interacts with and influences neighboring fields such as development. Their study, however, addresses the questions of when, how, and why the field of human rights has sought to maintain a boundary between its efforts and those of democracy promoters. Drawing on a variety of forms of historical evidence, they argue that leading human rights organizations engaged in boundary policing vis-à-vis democracy promotion starting especially in the 1980s because they saw it as a threat. Whereas Bush and Stroup argue that leading human rights advocates turned away from issues related to democracy in the 1980s, Ryan Phillips notes that European Union leaders began to take these issues up shortly afterwards. The panel’s third paper thus seeks to explain why the EU switched course in 1993 by making membership conditional on democracy. Phillips argues that EU accession conditionality was the policy manifestation of new causal theories of democratization. Finally, the panel’s fourth paper offers a different answer to the question of why democracy promotion occurs under certain conditions but not others. Focusing on the case of the United States, Jonathan Monten posits that outside powers are more likely to support democracy in other states when they believe that doing so will lead to the election of friendly governments in the future.

Although global efforts to advance human rights and promote democracy may go together in practice, they are often studied separately within the academy. As such, a unique contribution of this panel is to bring together scholars who are studying “human rights” and “democracy promotion” both separately and jointly.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 17: International Collaboration

Individual Presentations

• Access to Productive Assets: Human Rights-Based Approaches and the SDGs - Paul J. Nelson, University of Pittsburgh

• Field of Dreams: The Chimeric Connection of Human Rights and Democracy Promotion - Sarah S. Stroup, Middlebury College; Sarah S. Bush, Yale University

• The Strategic Logic of Foreign-Imposed Democracy - Jonathan Monten, University College London

• Promoting Democracy Abroad: the Origins of EU Accession Conditionality - Ryan Phillips, Lycoming College

Chair

• Scott Straus University of Wisconsin, Madison

Discussant

• Scott Straus University of Wisconsin, Madison