Hafner-Burton & Ron: Seeing Double: Human Rights Impact Through Qualitative and Quantitative Eyes

Emilie Marie Hafner-Burton (Univ. of California, San Diego - Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies) & James Ron (Carleton Univ. - School of International Affairs) have posted Seeing Double: Human Rights Impact Through Qualitative and Quantitative Eyes. Here's the abstract:

Over the past two decades, human rights language has spread like wildfire across international policy arenas. The activists who sparked this fire are engaged in two different campaigns. The first is comparatively modest, involving the persuasion of tens of thousands of global elites such as journalists, UN officials, donors, and national political leaders. The second is broader and more complex: to make real impact on the behavior of tens of millions of state agents worldwide. While most international relations scholars agree that the first campaign has made real gains, opinions are split on the success - past, present and future - of the second. In part, these divisions fall along methodological lines. With some exceptions, qualitative scholars working in the empirical international relations tradition express more optimism than their quantitative counterparts, whose contributions to the sub-field are relatively new. This article reviews several new books on human rights and shows how their insights engage with these ongoing methodological debates. We argue that both qualitative and quantitative approaches offer important strengths, and that neither has a monopoly on truth. Still, the human rights discourse may be thriving, at least in part, for reasons unrelated to impact. We conclude with suggestions for more systematic and multi-method research, along with a plea for scholarly attention to the potential downsides of international human rights promotion.