In Human Rights for Pragmatists, Jack Snyder develops a “pragmatic theory” for advancing human rights (p. 17). He differentiates his approach from the strategy of mainstream human rights organizations and activists whom he criticizes for overemphasizing universal moral and legal norms and moving too quickly to insist that human rights are obligatory (pp. 3, 6–7, 12–17, 126). He finds that their strategy frequently backfires and increases opposition to human rights. Contested rights are unlikely to prevail until they serve the interests of the powerful. He recommends trying to create favorable political conditions and supportive institutions in rights-violating societies before pressing to make human rights legally binding (pp. x, 6).
To substantiate his case, Snyder synthesizes a large, multidisciplinary body of research, much of it examining the movement of traditional societies toward becoming modern rights-respecting societies. His first chapter title captures his “guiding hypothesis”: “Power Leads, Rights Follow” (pp. 1–31, 81–93, 103–4, 108). If a rights-promoting strategy is to succeed, it must recognize that “in sequencing the shift to a rights-based society, politics and power must lead, rights follow” (pp. 17, 3). He cautions activists: “Jumping the gun increases the likelihood of triggering and institutionalizing backlash that leaves the rights project more distant from its goal.” A primary question for “pragmatic proponents of human rights” is “when to begin treating rights as if they are obligatory for the whole society rather than just aspirational” (p. 6).
This formulation suggests a conceptual difference compared to many human rights scholars and organizations. They are likely to ask: Are not people’s basic human rights, such as to be spared from genocide or arbitrary death, always binding on everybody, even though some political leaders refuse to recognize them? Does a pragmatist ever need to say, much less have the entitlement to say, that a fundamental human right is merely “aspirational,” rather than “obligatory”?
Snyder’s “guiding hypothesis” interlinks with four additional hypotheses that together provide his main arguments: Rights are likely to be respected “(1) when the prevailing mode of social organization is no longer based on repression and favoritism but has evolved toward social relations among individuals based on impersonal rules of equal treatment; (2) when rights serve the interest of a dominant coalition, and when they are stabilized by (3) implementing institutions and (4) a locally persuasive ideology” (pp. 3–4).
“The most basic anchor for a pragmatic theory of human rights,” Snyder believes, “is the insight that sustaining successful modernity has so far been impossible without them” (pp. 8, 33–34, 38). China’s future economic success or lack of it, as well as that of several modern quasi-democracies that are now becoming more authoritarian, will test this debatable “anchor,” as Snyder acknowledges. In the meantime, a strategy to promote human rights by “decrying the Chinese regime’s oppression of rights activists and violations of legal rights is an empty, performative exercise” (p. 120).
Snyder argues that strategies of “naming and shaming” to promote rights are “likely to produce anger, resistance, backlash, and the glorification of deviance from hegemonic outsiders’ norms” (pp. 190–97). Snyder also explains that “free speech absolutism” has led to the collapse of journalistic standards, the “dissemination of false information,” and the “polarization of political attitudes” (pp. 144–45). Media freedom should never be absolute because “a weakly institutionalized media market will be hijacked … by elite propaganda, hate speech, self-serving narratives of identity groups and parochial interest groups, demagogic populism, and ‘bread and circus’ media distractions …” (p. 149).
In the United States and many other liberal societies, “democracy’s fixable problem is that unregulated forms of liberalism—libertarian economics and free-speech absolutism—have thrown away the pragmatic steering mechanisms that were designed to keep rights-based societies on a constructive path” (pp. x, 2). As a result, “the captains of liberalism” have created “conditions that fostered economic inequality and mismanagement, disruptive cultural change, and a deficit of governmental accountability.” The world is “precariously poised between the forces of liberalism and illiberalism.” (pp. 239–40).
Snyder criticizes Human Rights Watch for being “slow in moving away from prioritizing civil and political rights over economic and social rights.” This attitude has made it difficult to mobilize “mass social movements around mainstream human rights themes in the developing world” (p. 66). Human rights organizations’ “accustomed style of work … is far too narrow to be the central engine of progressive change, even in its own arena of human rights,” because “rights progress depends on far broader trends of socioeconomic context” (p. 143). He encourages liberalism to “extricate itself” from being associated with neoliberalism’s “free-market-fundamentalism,” and instead to emphasize “social welfare and economic justice as central to its mission” (p. 66).
Although Snyder reports that “peace is the single strongest correlate of human rights compliance” (p. 240), this does not lead him toward a significant human rights role for international law or institutions. Evidence “tends to cast doubt on the claims that international trials deter future atrocities, contribute to consolidating the rule of law or democracy, or pave the way for peace” (pp. 94–100). Snyder does not mention the human rights significance of the Nuremberg trials following World War II, which, although flawed as victors’ justice, established the historic precedent for holding top government officials personally accountable for violating international laws prohibiting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.
He also does not critique the great powers’ failure to do more to buttress the international enforcement of human rights, nor their power-maximizing grand strategies for national security, justified by political realism, that diminish human rights. Snyder does note that external efforts “to promote democracy and rights in illiberal states may … be worthwhile,” if they “operate through the principle of the open door—liberal democracy as a club that states … can … join when they are ready and willing to take on its rules” (pp. 47, 240). He contrasts this strategy, illustrated by the European Union, with unsuccessful “high-pressure sales” by human rights activists (p. 45).
Snyder’s overall analysis confirms that rights activists should pay careful attention to the consequences of their advocacy and use those to shape evolving strategies. A pragmatist persuades from within the community, not by shaming but by drawing on a local culture’s “vernacular concepts of decency and justice” (p. 202). The “most effective role for outsiders is to change the incentives and opportunities in the broad environment in which abuses occur” (pp. 20–21), such as eliminating import tariffs on fair-trade products or importing goods only from suppliers that comply with certified labor standards.
Scholars, government officials, activists, and citizens—all can benefit from Snyder’s monumental synthesis of social science research bearing on the promotion of human rights. He develops numerous compelling suggestions for making human rights strategies more effective. However, many human rights experts will question some interpretations, emphases, and selections of topics; a few concerns are mentioned above. In addition, none of the following issues are satisfactorily addressed in Snyder’s analysis, although they could be fruitful parts of scholars’ future agendas:
1. If the sequencing part of Snyder’s main argument—“power leads, rights follow”—is used to delay making human rights claims (rather than simply to contextualize them), that part seems uncompelling. The particular power and politics that will lead to rights are often animated by advocacy insisting that basic rights are obligatory. Empirically, human rights claims may precede and inform politics, not simply follow it.
Further research should identify the conditions in which principled advocacy can be effective against backlash, because backlash is likely to arise in both modern and traditional societies. Although Snyder does not refer to his work, Paul Gordon Lauren addresses backlash issues in a highly acclaimed history, The Evolution of International Human Rights ([1998] 2011). He shows that rights advocates throughout history “invariably found themselves ridiculed as naïve idealists or impractical dreamers, reviled and persecuted as traitors to their own exclusive group or nation, or even tortured and killed ….” Even though they did not wait until favorable political conditions were established before making rights claims, they did “transform the world” (Lauren [1998] 2011, pp. 1–3).
Moreover, if rights are massively endangered, as they are when genocide, nuclear war, or environmental destruction threaten, a thoughtful pragmatist might justify immediate, universal rights claims, even if they produce some backlash, because failure to make rights claims immediately could mean people’s rights would be lost forever to irretrievable disaster. Snyder does not address the three preceding threats as human rights issues.
In cases involving less deadly threats to rights, Snyder’s recommendations for waiting and dampening one’s rights claims in order to reduce backfiring may seem more compelling. Still, for many people, the sequencing-delay argument does not seem necessary for making the case, which he does well, that rights strategies should be sensitive to the contexts in which debates over rights occur.
2. Many scholars and activists believe that fundamental human rights should be treated as inalienable entitlements of every human being. These are never reducible to culturally dependent political or legislative opportunities, a conceptual move that Snyder’s analysis implies. Can pragmatists agree that some rights are inalienable, and not to be derogated?
3. To what extent will Snyder’s pragmatic “anchor” hold true, that modern societies cannot sustain themselves as economic leaders without honoring human rights? If true, what particular rights will need to be reinstated among those that now are disappearing in quasi-democracies such as Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and even France and the United States? Do pragmatists have any other, possibly more reliable, “anchor” for rights?
4. Thomas Pogge (Politics as Usual, 2010) and many other experts believe that the world’s biggest human rights violation over the past three decades has been the perpetuation by liberal, wealthy countries of an international system that produces chronic global poverty. If power leads and rights follow, why have the United States and other liberal societies not done more to advance economic human rights?
5. What are the pragmatic human rights consequences of the major carbon-emitting countries refusing to address environmental destruction effectively?
6. To what extent should a pragmatic theory for human rights emphasize (1) establishing more effective international enforcement of international human rights laws on states (the primary violators of rights) and (2) obeying existing laws that aim to constrain states’ use of military force (the primary threat to the “strongest correlate” of rights)?
Snyder concludes that, when converting people to support human rights, persuasion “works by social proof more than by logic or ethical precepts. That’s why human rights needs to be pragmatic: to persuade by showing that rights work” (p. 246). True, the utility of rights is an influential argument. However, when human rights do not work and fail to provide pragmatic material benefits—as often happens, for example, with rights for the infirm or a minority—such rights do not simply vanish. Rights continue, sustained by people’s ethical beliefs that fundamental rights are inalienable. To be empirically accurate, pragmatists need to assess the power in moral principles as well as in material political power, because ethical principles help to generate the political will needed to entrench human rights into law and to make law effective once enacted.
