GPPi contributes chapter to new book on the power of human rights

GPPi researcher Katrin Kinzelbach has published a chapter in the recently published book The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance. Published by Cambridge University Press in March 2013, and edited by Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink, the book revisits the ​“spiral model” of human rights change, which made an influential contribution to the study of international human rights in 1999.

The new volume specifies the processes and scope conditions that produce behavioral compliance with human rights norms among states and non-state actors. Unlike the original spiral model, the new version also looks at human rights compliance by powerful states.

Kinzelbach’s chapter, titled Resisting the Power of Human rights: The People’s Republic of China, argues that China is a particularly hard case for the power of human rights. It reviews to what extent different mechanisms – notably capacity building, incentives and persuasion – push China towards compliance, but also how the People’s Republic counters and undermines these mechanisms. The China case delineates certain limits to the power of human rights, while also demonstrating that even under particularly unfavorable circumstances, advances towards compliance can be made in accordance with the spiral model’s predictions. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the options available to international actors when addressing human rights violations in countries that not only suppresses domestic activists but also command significant international power.