While a growing body of research explores the ways in which NGOs affect IO accountability, relatively little high-level, sustained international advocacy has focused on the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and IOM has been under-examined in the literature on NGOs and IO accountability. This is surprising as IOM has a history of involvement in activities such as migrant returns and detention that may threaten or actively violate migrants’ rights—activities that call out for careful external scrutiny. This chapter explores the drivers and implications of this puzzling disconnect, and opportunities to overcome it. We map out the limited ways in which international human rights advocacy organizations have engaged with IOM, and consider why advocacy NGOs have not more actively pushed for increased accountability from IOM. International advocacy NGOs have important but still under-developed roles to play in advancing accountability for the human rights implications of IOM’s work. Enhancing accountability is a two-way street: there is a need for advocates to devote more attention to IOM, and develop more concerted advocacy strategies vis-à-vis IOM. Meanwhile, IOM should clearly recognize the importance of external advocacy, and engage more openly and systematically with human rights advocates, moving beyond traditional postures of defensiveness, dismissal and secrecy.

This chapter examines the path from the origins of the United Nations and its Charter to the 2030 Global Agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and charts the interconnectedness of fundamental concepts that underpin the human rights movement to today’s implementation of the SDGs. Specifically, we explore how the twentieth-century origins of the United Nations transformed into twenty-first-century platforms of action and advocacy through support from psychological research. Early concepts provided by key historical figures are linked to the evolution of those concepts to form the current global agenda. For example, how do the basic pillars of the UN system form a conceptual foundation for planning and advocating for human rights? The chapter illustrates the inter-relatedness of these foundations and presents perspectives to create support for successful implementation through the value of psychological science to facilitate behavior change in formal educational settings, in community settings, and with technology. We address ways in which informing civil society plays a vital role in achieving success in addition to financial support from Member States. Finally, the chapter describes how the education of citizens globally is essential to the implementation of the SDGs and presents the promise of psychological research to potentiate the effectiveness of educational models.

This chapter questions the proposition that populism is antithetical to human rights. In a constitutional democracy with checks and balances, populism is a form of popular mobilization on moral grounds, and provides an arena for doing something to counter status quo bias. There may indeed be dangers from authoritarian populists, perhaps better described as authoritarians masquerading as populists. But it is necessary to distinguish between liberal and illiberal populists, or inclusive and exclusive populism. Populism offers lessons that the human rights community should learn, including the importance of social movements, the need for clear narrative that encompasses both majorities and minorities, and the use of emotion as the language of values.