Journal Article

Do Global Publics View Human Rights Organizations as Handmaidens of the United States?

RON, JAMES, CROW, DAVID

2020

Overview

In the spring of 2014, a group of prominent commentators slammed the New York–based organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) for maintaining a “revolving door” with the U.S. government. Exhibit A, the critics said, was Tom Malinowski, a senior staffer who had joined HRW in 2001 after seven years working in the U.S. government, returned to government service from 2013 to 2017, and then was elected as a New Jersey congressman in 2018. This and similar cases, the critics said, made HRW appear overly cozy with U.S. officialdom. Given “the impact of global perceptions on HRW's ability to carry out its work,” the letter writers opined, even the “appearance of impropriety” undermined the organization's credibility. To counter these and similar views, HRW has ramped up its criticism of U.S. policies, opened new offices outside North America, and hired more international staff. Other international human rights organizations (IHROs) have done the same, including Amnesty International, another well‐known group whose “moving closer to the ground” strategy has relocated portions of its International Secretariat from London to cities in the Global South. Major private funders, including the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, have financially supported these globalization efforts. The foregoing letter criticizing HRW is only one of many such exchanges in a lengthy debate ongoing since the 1970s, when human rights groups first began participating in debates over international politics: whose geopolitical interests do human rights groups really serve? When HROs chastise governments, are they geopolitically impartial neutrals advancing universal principles, furthering U.S. geopolitical interests by delegitimizing rivals and promoting liberal‐capitalist ideology, or engaging in global “soft balancing”? All actors in this debate must assume that public opinion is generally on their side; to believe otherwise would be to suggest that HROs have systematically deceived publics worldwide. Until now, however, there has been little systematic investigation of global publics’ actual perceptions of HROs’ relations with the United States. To be sure, survey researchers do regularly ask publics worldwide about their views of the United States. A handful, moreover, have asked the public for their opinions toward human rights principles. The surveys conducted for the current study, however, are the only ones we know of to simultaneously ask about attitudes toward HROs and the U.S. government. As a result, we know little of the relationship between the two. To investigate, we administered our Human Rights Perceptions Poll to 9,380 people through face‐to‐face interviews in six countries in Latin America, North Africa, sub‐Saharan Africa, and South Asia. In India, Morocco, and Nigeria, we surveyed adults living in and around major financial and political centers (Mumbai, Rabat/Casablanca, and Lagos). In Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, by contrast, our surveys were nationally representative (see Appendix B). We hypothesize that publics do not regard HROs as allies of U.S. foreign policy; instead, we expect them to view rights organizations either as geopolitical neutrals or as counterhegemons. Statistical analysis of our survey data offers support for this claim; in four of the six locales we investigated and in our pooled, all‐country sample, public trust in local HROs (LHROs) is negatively and significantly associated with trust in the U.S. government. The same is true for IHROs in our three Latin American cases and in the pooled sample. As our hypothesis predicted, in none of our cases across world regions is public trust in HROs positively associated with public trust in the U.S. government. These findings cumulatively support our expectation that publics do not view HROs as “handmaidens” of U.S. imperialism. We begin by demonstrating the statistical association between public trust in HROs and mistrust in the U.S. government in Latin America. This is a “most likely” case, as HROs working in and on Latin America have historically opposed U.S.‐supported state repression by right‐wing authoritarians. If people anywhere are likely to view HROs as neutral or opposed to U.S. primacy, they will do so here. Controlling for other relevant factors, we find exactly that: public mistrust in the U.S. government in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico is indeed significantly associated with greater trust in both LHROs and IHROs. The relationship between trust in HROs and in the U.S. government, in other words, is inverse. Extending our investigation to three other world regions offers a more demanding test, given their broader array of cultural, religious, historical, and geostrategic conditions. Still, even outside Latin America we found no positive associations between trust in the U.S. government and trust in HROs. To be sure, HRW's critics may, or may not, be correct in alleging the organization has been closely connected to the U.S. government; our surveys cannot shed light on this question. As far as public opinion goes in our six cases, however, rights organizations have little cause for concern on this count, as the general public does not perceive them as U.S. government allies. Proponents of U.S. soft power, however, should be concerned; if you believe the U.S. government really is a global rights promoter, it should be discomfiting to learn that this view is not widely shared in these six countries.

• Publisher: Wiley,Oxford University Press
• Subject: Adults / Attitudes / Capitalism / Credibility / Criticism / Debates / Foreign policy / General public / Geopolitics / Globalization / Government / Groups / Human rights / Imperialism / Interest groups / International relations / Investigations / Letters (Correspondence) / Officialdom / Oppression / Organizations / Perceptions / Political attitudes / Political finance / Polls & surveys / Primacy / Public officials / Public opinion / Quantitative analysis / Regions / Society / Soft power / State / Statistical analysis / Trust