Selective attention? Human rights organizations and Anti-state naming and shaming, 1995–2018

Which states do human rights organizations (HROs) prioritize to “name and shame” for human rights abuses? This study offers a new dataset of anti-state shaming by HROs derived from machine-coded readings of news media articles. The dataset provides novel opportunities to investigate the factors that prompt different types of shaming by HROs, as well as how HROs differ in their shaming practices. Analyzing 155 countries from 1995–2018, I find that international HROs are responsive to the activities of local civil societies, both by amplifying grievances of domestic social movements and shaming states that repress civil society organizations. During periods of anti-government unrest, international HROs highlight abuses of the government for global audiences, demonstrating activists’ agency to put their nation on the agendas of HROs. HROs also dedicate significantly less attention to states that have adversarial relations with the West, suggesting HROs seek to draw attention to states beyond those that already receive negative attention from Western states. Lastly, the findings point to some differences in the shaming tendencies of Amnesty International (AI) and other HROs such as Human Rights Watch, complicating a notion seen in previous work that AI’s practices are generalizable.