POWER, PATRONAGE AND INTERNATIONAL NORMS

Why do some of the world's least powerful countries invite international scrutiny of their adherence to norms on whose violation their governments rely to remain in power? Examining decisions by leaders in Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Georgia, Valerie Freeland concludes that these states invited outside attention with the intention to manipulate it. Their countries' global peripherality and their domestic rule by patronage introduces both challenges and strategies for addressing them. Rulers who attempt this manipulation of scrutiny succeed when their patronage networks make them illegible to outsiders, and when powerful actors become willing participants in the charade as they need a success case to lend them credibility. Freeland argues that, when substantive norm-violations are rebranded as examples of compliance, what it means to comply with human rights and good governance norms becomes increasingly incoherent and, as a result, less able to constrain future norm-violators.

Identifies structural reasons why some countries consistently violate rights-based international norms
Locates agency within the least powerful states as they navigate a world that presumes bureaucratic as opposed to patronage-based domestic order, demonstrating that they are neither as passive nor as dismissible as most theories suppose, and that their lack of material and agenda-setting power can in itself become a source of symbolic power
Shows how powerful states and international organizations enable violation of the same norms they claim to advance, providing insight into why the powerful sometimes have incentives to turn a blind eye to norm violations, and that norm-promotion sometimes requires this kind of compromise