Human Rights in the Post-Communist World

by Rachel Boehr

Left: Professor Alexander Cooley of Barnard College co-convened the lecture series and / Courtesy of Alexander Cooley; Right: Professor Jack Snyder of Columbia University has been researching impacts of human rights movements. /Courtesy of Jack Snyder

The Harriman Institute has organized a year-long lecture series on “Human Rights and the Post-Communist World.” Professors Jack Snyder and Alexander Cooley, both faculty of Harriman Institute and of Columbia and Barnard’s political science departments, respectively, spoke with RightsNews about the series.

Q: How did this series come about?

Cooley: Each year for the last six years, the Harriman Institute has selected a “core project,” designed by faculty members, often related to their areas of research. While I have been particularly interested in ratings, rankings, and indices, Professor Snyder has been looking into various strategies used by human rights movements, especially from the early 1990s to today, and assessing their impacts and effectiveness. Working together, we saw a connection between the two research areas and decided to form “Human Rights in the Post-Communist World: Strategies and Outcomes” as a lecture series.

Q: What were your specific ideas behind the series?

Snyder: I’ve been evaluating strategies human rights activists have employed to accomplish their goals. In the 1990s these strategies were, in general, legalistic, universalistic, and moralistic. This served a purpose in mobilizing a pro-human rights community.

It’s contentious how successful this has been. This has mainly come from social scientists who generally have a more quantitative approach. In particular, they’re looking at whether signing a treaty changes behavior or whether naming-and-shaming changes behavior. For example, my research has looked at the legalistic approach, and in some cases, indicting a human rights violator has led to them clinging to power even more. Perhaps there is more use in negotiating with powerful people rather than limiting the bargaining that can occur.

So by looking at factors that determine human rights, we can look at lessons that may inform activists. Therefore we decided to bring together scholars and activists to discuss some of these current issues.

Cooley: My interests are in indices and rankings. More specifically, how has growth of these rankings occurred? Why have some developed as authorities while others are less respected? Why are some issue-focused while others are better known for the agency putting them out, like Amnesty? Finally, how do states react to rankings? In terms of the last question, I am interested in the effectiveness and behavior change (if any) as a result of the indices.

Q: How did you choose the topics?

Cooley: The rankings panels, namely corruption, came from the research that I have been working on. This spoke to the issue of transparency, in that you can have sided and stigmatizing indices.

The international anti-corruption regime has really grown, seemingly from nothing, in the last 10 to 15 years, creating a prominent place for governance discourse. As Professor Bukovansky [of Smith College and panelist on “The Politics of International Corruption Ratings”] noted during the series, what’s particularly interesting is the selectivity with which the issue of corruption is being tackled.

Other topics, like media, were interesting because there are competing rankings out there, i.e. Freedom House vs. Reporters Without Borders, Committee to Protect Journalists, and indigenous rankings emerging, especially in Africa. Therefore we can look at the contrast between a ‘crowded sector’ of rankings vs.versus the more entrenched rankings, like corruption.

As we write up the findings of this series, it will be interesting to examine what impact the context of the ranking sector has on these evaluation mechanisms.

Q: How did you choose the speakers?

Cooley: We strove for a balance of academics and practitioners. On the academic side, it was often clear. For example, Lee Becker at University of Georgia is the preeminent scholar in international media rankings. It was often helpful to have someone who could stimulate the dialogue, like Mlada [Bukovansky, Smith College], who has been somewhat critical of corruption rankings.

Then we have someone like Nathaniel Heller of Global Integrity, who is what I would call a “second-generation evaluator,” who may be a bit critical to the traditional model of corruption ratings but not entirely oppositional.

Additionally, we wanted a policy person to respond, and finally a member of the New York City human rights community to contribute a practitioner’s point of view.

Going forward, it would be great to have members of the media on the panels, who can speak to the public dissemination of these monitoring tools.

Snyder: We had conversations with the Open Society Institute [now Open Society Foundations] as we were conceptualizing the series. We discussed things like what topics would be good, where the events should be held, etc. Aryeh Neier [President, OSI, and Founder of Human Rights Watch] was interested in the proposed transitional justice event. Many of the scholars were Columbia PhDs or collaborators with other panelists.

Q: What were your some of your goals in designing this series?

Cooley: First and foremost, our natural aim is to raise awareness among the Columbia community of these trends. With our access to resources and to the New York human rights community, we are in a terrific position to give students the chance to think critically about these issues. After all, it is these students that may very well be members of this community in the near future.

Secondly, we wanted to create a document of these conversations. So we’ve collected a transcript of the events, which will hopefully be included in a special edition of the Harriman Review.

Q: What can be learned from focusing on the post-Communist region?

Snyder: The post-Communist region is interesting as a “testing ground” for many human rights mechanisms, legalistic and otherwise. In this region, there are huge variations in techniques employed by actors, ranging from no justice to war tribunals in Yugoslavia to lustration of officials that collaborated with the secret police. It’s sort of a poster child for the different approaches.

Q: Where do you hope to take this dialogue in the future?

Cooley: The lecture series goes through December 2011, so expect more events in the fall. Beyond that, there will be a special edition of the Harriman Review with transcripts of some of the sessions. The videos will also be disseminated and archived through Columbia’s CIAO service. We are also working on an edited book on ratings, rankings, and indicators, to which many of our panelists will be contributing chapters.

Snyder: There is also a possibility of a transitional justice network that Ruti [Teitel] is organizing through the Center for International Law at New York Law School, of which several other participants of the series expressed interest in.

Published in RightsNews Volume 29, no. 3, May, 2011.
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