I am grateful to David Keen for this thoughtful engagement with my book. I especially appreciate his attention to where our work overlaps and diverges. As he observes, we often reach similar conclusions through different lines of thinking. Here, I want to elaborate on two areas of departure and convergence between our respective approaches to shaming.

First, Keen’s attention to the emotion of shame, and its role in individual psychology, is a useful complement to my book’s more macro approach, in which I explicitly bracket the feeling of shame to concentrate on the social process of shaming. As Keen helpfully reminds us, shame and shaming are deeply intertwined. The psychological handling of shame—particularly through compensation, offloading, or projective identification—is central to the process by which shaming leads variably to restitution or violence. Shame (a painful emotion) and shamelessness (a common defense) are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, it is interesting how these intrapsychic conflicts appear to mirror interpersonal and even international dynamics. Future analysts must take up the challenging yet critical task of elucidating precisely how these mechanisms aggregate across levels of analysis. Appreciating the microfoundations around shame will enable a more comprehensive understanding of shaming between people and between nations.

Second, I would like to unpack a suggestion that Keen offers toward the end of his review that would-be shamers try to “identify those elements of shared beliefs and values that do exist—and to engage with those parts of a shamed polity that share such values.” This prescription rests on an empirical claim, one that seems quite intuitive to me: effective shaming relies in part on emphasizing shared values. But why is this the case? That is, by what causal logic would highlighting shared values optimize the effectiveness of shaming and minimize its potential for backlash?

There are a few possibilities. One involves a mechanism toward compliance that runs through personal normative beliefs. On this view, shaming—when done well—operates by recruiting the subject’s own, sincerely held values, instilling a kind of productive shame that drives the desire to align one’s behavior with one’s beliefs. Put differently, identifying shared values works by persuading actors that what they are doing is genuinely wrong according to their own standards. When shamer and target hold very divergent values, shamers are more likely to condemn violations based on their own norms rather than those of the target. Shamed for things they never considered unacceptable, targets may well ask, “why should I care?”

However, there are good reasons to question this theoretical tie between shaming, compliance, and sincerely held beliefs. In my book, I argue that shaming—even effective shaming—does not require that the target share or internalize the norm of the stigmatizer. I raise the example of individuals moving between cultures, who are often shamed based on norms that are entirely foreign and external to them, and yet change their behavior to fit in nonetheless. Likewise, political actors will often behave strategically to shape the judgment of others regardless of whether they genuinely believe what they are doing is right or wrong.

How, then, would identifying shared values be an effective tactic? I want to suggest a different mechanism, one that relies less on sincerely held beliefs than on the relational aspects at play. When a shamer emphasizes shared values, she is tapping not only into something internal to the target but also into the nature of the relationship between them. Specifically, she is signaling that shaming is motivated by a sincere commitment to the norm and not hostility toward the target per se. My book argues that actors have an incentive not to antagonize their friends, allies, and strategic partners. As a result, their rhetorical approach tends to be less stigmatizing. Emphasizing shared values works by revealing information about one’s intentions toward, and relationship to, the target; it communicates affinity and a desire to cooperate. It is this very affinity that makes shaming effective and motivates the target to comply. Those who seek to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship are incentivized to accommodate their partner’s demands, regardless of whether they believe such demands are morally correct.

An analogous mechanism occurs when the shamer is hypocritical. Shaming mired in hypocrisy often fails to produce compliance, but not because hypocrisy signals different values per se. Rather, hypocrisy shapes perceptions of motive. When people are shamed by hypocrites, they can plausibly assume that the shamers are motivated by nefarious intentions, a desire to weaponize norms in order to attack or degrade the target. Such perceptions drive the kind of defensive reaction that fuels backlash.

Viewed in this light, we can see once again how Keen and I reach similar conclusions through different causal pathways, ontologies, or levels of analysis. Such convergences and divergences will, I hope, contribute to the burgeoning conversation around shame and shaming in world politics.