A House Divided: Norm Fragmentation in the International Human Rights Regime

Although human rights are widely endorsed in the abstract, significant variation exists in the degree to which different states endorse different rights. To what extent is the international human rights community divided? This research note examines fragmentation in the international human rights regime using an inductive, data-driven approach. We trace states’ normative positions as they are expressed in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a UN mechanism where states “peer review” one another's human rights practices. We analyze over 56,000 recommendations from the first two cycles of the UPR using data collected from the non-profit organization UPR Info. Employing unsupervised scaling and clustering methods, we find four interstate clusters or factions emerging from this process: Civil Libertarians, Developmentalists, Institutionalists, and Egalitarians. Our results indicate that the international human rights regime reflects less a singular community than a set of communities, each constituted by a distinct configuration of normative positions. They also reveal new insights about specific norms: while women's rights and children's rights are broadly endorsed, norms related to sexuality and migration are more contentious and partisan. While our findings are descriptive, they lay the foundation for new causal questions of interest to scholars of human rights and international norms.