Stay Off My Field: Policing Boundaries in Human Rights and Democracy Promotion

Human rights and democracy are closely related liberal ideals.¹ They are intertwined in international law. Moreover, democracies are more likely to respect human rights than non-democracies. Yet the transnational fields of human rights (HR) and democracy promotion (DP) are largely separate. It is “surprising,” writes Kathryn Sikkink, that “democracy-promotion advocacy is often separated from, and sometimes even counterposed to, human rights policy.”² The separation is even more remarkable as both fields have expanded their ties to other fields, including development, humanitarianism, and peacebuilding. Despite many incentives to create a single field promoting political liberalism, we show below that there is a durable boundary between the HR and DP fields, particularly among the Western non-state actors that dominate them. Why did this boundary emerge, and why has it continued?

We identify ideological differences as the key factor in accounting for a boundary that has continued over four decades, despite vast changes in global politics.³ The two fields hold different ideas about how the world does and should work that largely pivot around different conceptions of the state. The human rights field is cosmopolitan in its prioritization of individual rights violations and preference for international law as the remedy. Although it had earlier antecedents, the human rights field emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to transcend Cold War politics and emphasized the construction and implementation of international law to protect individual rights. During this era, what would later come to be identified as DP organizations largely overlapped with HR ones. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, democracy promotion coalesced as a separate field. The emergent democracy promotion field was statist in its attention to the structural determinants of freedom and willingness to work with national authorities to alter state institutions and practices. When the boundary between human rights and democracy promotion subsequently came into question, the disjuncture between the two fields has been maintained by what we call boundary policing, a strategy largely used by HR organizations against DP ones. Rather than see democracy promotion as parallel, complementary, or coincidental to their work, leading HR groups policed their boundary with democracy promotion because they viewed it as a challenge to their version of liberalism.

Our explanation for the maintenance of the boundary between the HR and DP fields has theoretical, methodological, and practical implications. First, we assess possible explanations for the strategic choice of boundary policing. The HR and DP fields are non-state fields, where non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play leading roles. Existing studies of non-state actors focus on how functional necessity, resource availability, and sequencing shape their strategies. Our theory of boundary policing, which highlights actors’ ideological commitments, instead sheds light on the sources of NGO preferences, something Carpenter describes as “badly need[ed]” within the literature.⁴ Second, we draw attention to how fields are constructed, highlighting the role of proximate projects in defining field boundaries. International relations (IR) scholars have increasingly turned their attention to studying entire populations of organizations.⁵ This approach requires identifying and explaining field boundaries, especially because boundaries inform actors’ identities, networks, and tactics.⁶ Third, we contribute to the push towards greater transparency in qualitative research. Given the breadth of our topic, we use archival material, seventeen first-person interviews, descriptive statistics, and an analysis of a key case to draw descriptive and causal inferences. To present this material, we employ the Annotation for Transparent Inquiry framework, which builds on “active citation” to provide digital annotations of qualitative material.⁷ Our annotations bolster our evidentiary claims and make our analytic process more transparent, without compromising confidentiality, informed consent, or copyright.

Finally, we offer insight into what some consider to be a current global crisis of liberalism or liberal internationalism.⁸ Although the boundary between HR and DP now has “taken for granted” status in many quarters, some analysts criticize it as counterproductive. Carothers argues that it “divert[s] the scarce resources and energies of the two groups away from their essential tasks.”⁹ Similarly, the “somewhat coy, arm’s-length treatment of democracy” from HR NGOs may hinder “developing long-term strategies that fully integrate the necessarily linked goals of democracy and rights.”¹⁰ Indeed, Viktor Orbán’s transformation from student recipient of HR funding in the 1980s and 1990s to opponent of liberalism as the current Prime Minister of Hungary has led one long-time HR activist that we interviewed to question the wisdom of avoiding democracy.¹¹ Attacks on political freedoms are likely to be more successful when liberalism’s proponents are fragmented.

Below, we first review the concept of fields and their boundaries. We then describe the boundary between HR and DP and offer a brief history of its emergence. The third section outlines our ideological explanation for the boundary, with a case study of the relationship between two critical actors, Amnesty International (AI) and Freedom House. Next, we consider three alternative explanations for boundary policing between HR and DP organizations: functional necessity, resource dependence, and sequencing. We end with lessons about the study of fields and their boundaries in IR.

The Boundaries of Fields

The study of global politics is organized around specific issues, from private environmental governance to international diplomacy.¹² Across disciplines, many scholars have converged on the study of issue areas as fields; the recent “practice turn” in IR is just one example.¹³ The IR literature on non-state actors provides insight into dynamics within fields, exploring the practices of organizations and networks.¹⁴ Yet, with a few exceptions,¹⁵ the relationships between fields remain largely unexamined.

To understand field boundaries, we use the concept of “strategic action fields.”¹⁶ Field relationships can vary in three ways: fields can be distant or proximate; state or non-state; and dependent, interdependent, or independent. In terms of the first dimension, we note that distant fields can affect one another, but proximate fields – like HR and DP – define the boundaries of where fields start and stop.¹⁷ In terms of the second, we observe that the two fields we examine are primarily non-state fields, although NGOs, international organizations (IOs), private foundations, and state agencies are all active on the issues of human rights and democracy promotion. Of course, like other nonstate fields, HR and DP are shaped by state resources, regulations, and practices. As we show below, however, NGOs have played an outsized role in defining and defending the boundary between the fields, sometimes in opposition to the preferences of more powerful states and donors. This study therefore seeks to understand the relationship between HR and DP NGOs.

Indeed, our main focus is on the final way that field relationships vary according to Fligstein and McAdam’s framework: the way that fields influence one another. The relationship between proximate fields can take several forms. Fields may be nested, with one field a subset of another, as in the case of the networks nested within human security.¹⁸ Fields may be overlapping, as in the case of climate change and global justice.¹⁹ Finally, fields may be disconnected, with clear boundaries, as when distinct groups worked in parallel to limit the expansion of sexual rights at the UN.²⁰

These boundaries emerge from interactions within and across fields. When fields are settled or institutionalized, we should find little discussion of boundaries that are taken for granted. When the political landscape changes, however, or when new resources or ideas from proximate fields provide threats or opportunities, actors may engage in boundary policing. We define boundary policing as an intentional strategy whereby actors consider and then intentionally exclude new issues, ideas, or resources. It differs from specialization or niche-building, which are more cooperative interactions that can yield parallel, nested, or complementary fields. Instead, it reflects a form of NGO competition, which is on the rise globally given the increasing density of NGO populations.²¹

Field boundaries have substantial impacts on real-world politics. Boundary spanning can mobilize resources and expand public support for the causes NGOs champion, but also challenge social movement identities.²² By contrast, boundary policing prevents spillover, or “the diffusion of ideas, activists, and tactics from one movement to another.”²³ The extent of spillover in turn determines actors’ influence within states and international institutions, although the relationship is not always linear.²⁴

Although the HR and DP fields could have been nested or substantially overlapping, we argue below that some HR organizations policed a boundary with DP organizations at moments when their divisions could have dissolved. Before doing so, however, we need to offer an account of the contemporary contours of this boundary. We do so in the next section, proceeding with caution. There is no definitive account of either field’s content, and even scholars may be implicated in the process of field construction. We are also aware that, by highlighting the differences between the two fields, we risk overstating the homogeneity within each. For example, some argue there are distinct American and European DP niches,²⁵ although others suggest the distinctions are overblown.²⁶ There are niches within human rights, as well.²⁷ Ultimately, however, we contend that the HR-DP boundary is surprisingly durable over time. Moreover, we will argue that the differences between DP and HR are much more marked within Western NGOs and at some global institutions than in many of the target countries in which these organizations work.

The Liberal Field that Never Was

Analysts have used a variety of methods to evaluate the content of fields. To characterize the HR and DP fields, we focus on four dimensions: how the relevant actors describe their work (self-conceptions), who they work with (networks), how they pursue their goals (strategies), and which issues they tackle (issue foci).

Self-Conceptions

Like other NGOs, organizations that are active in the HR and DP fields describe their stated goals in their mission statements. We consulted two comprehensive sources of information on NGOs in world politics, and evidence from both shows that there is limited stated overlap between HR and DP organizations during the contemporary period. First, we identified the 334 organizations out of 2,857 total NGOs registered with the European Union (EU) Transparency Register in February 2017 that mentioned human rights or democracy in describing their goals. Out of those organizations, only one-fifth (69 NGOs) reported working on both issues of human rights and democracy. Second, we analyzed the mission content of a random sample of HR NGOs from the 2017 Yearbook of International Organizations, which is a global directory of international NGOs. We found that the HR NGOs listed in the Yearbook are notably silent on democracy, with only 10% explicitly referencing democracy or elections in their mission statements. In addition to these general trends, we examined the mission content of leading HR NGOs, such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch (HRW), and found that they also made no mention of democracy or elections. By contrast, as we illustrate below, some prominent DP organizations such as Freedom House invoke human rights principles, suggesting that there could be differences in how organizations in the two fields conceptualize their work.

Recognizing that formal mission statements may only capture part of the picture, we also probed practitioners’ self-conceptions about their fields in our interviews. With only one partial exception, discussed in the next paragraph, the boundary between HR and DP was recognized, albeit often taken for granted, by our interviewees, especially those with experience working at HR groups. For example, one HR expert told us, “They are pursued in kind of separate but intersecting tracks… I have always been on the human rights side and then there are other people that have been on the democracy side, and sometimes you can feel like ‘never the twain shall meet.’”²⁸ By contrast, a staffer at a HR-focused philanthropy said it had never occurred to her to think about the fact that democracy promotion could be included in human rights.²⁹ As another HR interviewee put it, “democracy is very rarely mentioned out loud in the work of human rights organizations. It really doesn’t explicitly come up. The relationship is not debated.”³⁰

The people with more experience in the DP field that we spoke to also saw a boundary between human rights and democracy promotion, though they more regularly invoked human right principles than the human rights practitioners invoked the idea of democracy. The Open Society Foundations (OSF) operate on both sides of the boundary as both donor and advocate, for example, and one staffer said, “We don’t see them [democracy and human rights] as inconsistent or whatever, but I think you’re correct that the fields of play in the world are not as intersecting as one might think.”³¹ Another expert with experience in both fields acknowledged that the idea that HR and DP groups do not get along is a common “narrative going back twenty years.” This person, however, felt the conventional narrative was “wrong” – not because the fields do work closely together but because they are too busy with their own concerns to collaborate: “there are just very big, practical, day-to-day differences that make their existence just apples and oranges.”³² Thus, although actors in the fields have a variety of views on the boundary, our probes in interviews consistently revealed a disconnect.

Organizational and Personal Networks

Actors in the two fields also participate in separate networks. We turned to the Yearbook of International Organizations to understand organizational ties, as NGOs can self-report to the Yearbook on the other organizations with which they have a relationship. In 2017, there were 467 international NGOs classified as working in either human rights or democracy promotion. These groups reported 681 ties to other NGOs, but only three were between HR and DP NGOs.

As in many other fields,³³ professionalization reproduces and reinforces organizational networks. The professional backgrounds of the individuals working on human rights and democracy promotion tend to be different, although there are people who have worked on both sides of the divide. The differences are visible among staff at NGOs, but also IOs and state agencies. In human rights, the field’s leaders are often elites with interests in the law. For example, recruitment and training for HR officers deployed by the UN and other IOs favors those with legal training.³⁴ In the U.S., leaders such as Patricia Derian (the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs under President Carter) and Aryeh Neier (the co-founder of HRW) were described in one study as focused on the “legalistic aspects of human rights.”³⁵ In contrast, leaders within the DP field were traditionally more likely to come from political backgrounds. As such, they were “culturally, politically, and intellectual remote from international law.”³⁶ Over time, DP practitioners have come to have more technical backgrounds, especially in domains such as electoral assistance, which also distinguishes them from the legal orientation of many HR professionals while drawing them closer to some development practitioners.³⁷

Distinct Strategies

The differences in self-conceptions and networks are accompanied by different strategic choices. The advocacy/service delivery divide present in other NGO fields is evident here, with HR organizations falling more on the side of advocacy and DP organizations more on the side of service delivery, although there are exceptions. In Germany, for example, HR organizations see themselves mostly as protest organizations engaged in advocacy, whereas DP organizations work with the government on capacity-building and training programs.³⁸ Even when both HR and DP NGOs are engaged in advocacy, their political stances can stand in opposition. During the Syrian Civil War, for example, leading HR NGOs such as AI, HRW, and the Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme (FIDH) called for the International Criminal Court to investigate both the Syrian government and opposition forces for violations of international law. They also invoked international law in arguing for restrictions on weapons sales.³⁹ Meanwhile, leading DP NGO Freedom House called for greater U.S. involvement and support to Syrian opposition groups, including via arms transfers.⁴⁰ As these examples suggest, the boundary between the HR and DP fields is not a pedantic distinction. It informs the work of actors in each field, yielding disconnected and sometimes contradictory efforts.

Issue Foci

Finally, organizations in the HR and DP fields focus on somewhat different issues in their work. We examined five global institutions to assess how they describe the content of each field: the Community of Democracies, the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), the Human Rights Funders Network, and the United Nations (UN) Democracy Fund, and the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC).⁴¹ Though admittedly not a representative sample of global institutions, we focused on these institutions since they fund and support the activities of NGOs from a range of countries and explicitly cover issues related to human rights, democracy promotion, or both. Figure 1 includes issues mentioned more than once as part of HR, DP, or both across these five institutions. We can see that the HR field focuses on protecting the individual rights enshrined in international law, particularly for members of disadvantaged groups, whereas democracy promotion focuses more on structural changes at the national level, such as with its work on elections, governance, and the rule of law. That there is also substantial overlap between the two fields, as illustrated by common issues such as the media, political participation, and women’s organizations, reinforces the puzzle that motivates our paper, as it suggests that there is room for organizations in each field to collaborate.

DP Field	Cross-Cutting Issues	HR Field
Civic Education Civil Society Constitutions Elections Governance Legislatures and Parliaments Local Governance Political Parties Rule of Law Youth Participation	Media/Freedom of Expression Civic and Political Participation Women’s Participation and Women’s Organizations	Anti-discrimination Anti-violence Health and well-being rights Migration rights Sexual and reproductive rights Social/cultural rights Transitional justice Environmental rights

Figure 1

To further illustrate the different issue foci of the fields, consider the work of the UNHRC, an IO in which NGOs play an important advocacy role by design. Of the 57,686 recommendations made across the first two cycles of the institution’s Universal Periodic Reviews (UPRs) on 56 separate issues, 22% focused on “international instruments,” or bringing domestic law in line with international treaties. The other most-frequent issues mentioned were women’s rights (19%), children’s rights (18%), and torture (8%). Meanwhile, issues more central to democracy promotion were largely ignored, including elections (1%) and civil society (2%). That this important human rights institution does not pay greater attention to issues related to democracy is reflective of which issues are central to the HR agenda as it operates in practice, but not necessarily the content of international human rights law. Indeed, we show below that many of the documents – including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) – that form the basis of the UPR process explicitly reference democracy.

In sum, the fields of HR and DP are largely separate, particularly in the eyes of HR groups. In terms of how they see themselves, who they work which, which strategies they employ, and which issues they tackle, HR and DP are separated by a boundary. Now, we argue that this boundary was intentionally constructed – and, for some important organizations in the HR field, has required policing at key points in time.

Boundary History: The Emergence of Two Fields

Drawing upon excellent previous accounts of the two fields, we now show how the construction of a boundary between human rights and democracy promotion was an explicitly political strategy, not a natural process. After World War II, human rights and democracy were both used to legitimate new IOs, illustrating that the architects of the post-war order viewed them as connected. The 1945 UN Charter mentioned the phrase “human rights” seven times, and both concepts were foundational to the UN Commission on Human Rights (1946), the Genocide Convention (1948), and the UDHR (1948). These ideas then became largely dormant, caught up in interstate rivalries and debates at the UN over self-determination.⁴²

The Origins of the HR Field

Although it had earlier origins, human rights began to emerge as a distinct non-state field in the 1960s. Two International Covenants – on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) – elaborated on the rights in the UDHR, and their status as treaties gave them greater weight.⁴³ Diplomats from the global South played a key role in these breakthroughs.⁴⁴ Democracy was nested within human rights within the resulting legal documents; for example, Article 25 of the ICCPR emphasized the rights of individuals to democratic processes, including free and fair elections. At the same time as international law was developing, Amnesty International, founded in 1961 and later the winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize, offered a model for other HR groups to follow.⁴⁵

In the 1970s, powerful Western governments began to embrace human rights at least on a rhetorical level, again including the civil and political rights provided by democracy within their broader human rights approaches. In the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 in Europe, states committed to protect political rights and set up a schedule of conferences to monitor compliance.⁴⁶ The U.S. Carter administration laid out the three types of human rights it sought to protect, defining them in such a way that included democracy: personal integrity rights, basic human needs, and civil and political rights.⁴⁷ Congress established a Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in 1976 and funded rights protection in the 1978 Foreign Assistance Act with an emphasis on the protection of civil and political rights.

At this time, new Western-based NGOs provided bridges to connect local activists and powerful states. In France, the activism of 1968 and the ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in 1974 fed into a strong HR sector.⁴⁸ In the U.S., NGOs like Helsinki Watch (a predecessor to HRW) “quickly became leaders” thanks to U.S. global power.⁴⁹ By 1978, a U.S.-based “human rights lobby” had “over 50 organizations exercising major influence” in Congress, at the UN, and at multinational firms.⁵⁰ The growing HR field included activities in many countries: in 1978 the U.S. ranked 7^th in memberships in international HR NGOs, behind the United Kingdom, West Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, and Italy.⁵¹

The relationship of human rights to democracy was largely a non-issue among Western HR groups in these early days, as they concerned themselves with issues of political freedom even as they conceptualized of the work under the umbrella of “human rights” (not “human rights and democracy”). Outside of the West, human rights advocacy was often less supranational, directed instead at authoritarian governments. In the 1970s, new HR activists emerged outside of the West to combat apartheid in Africa, “neo-liberal authoritarian regimes” in Latin America, and “autocratic communist regimes” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.⁵² In these settings, especially, human rights and democracy activism were common endeavors.

1980s: The Arrival of Democracy Promotion

When the DP field started to emerge in the 1980s, it was not initially separate from human rights. In fact, the concept of “democracy promotion,” as such, arguably did not exist. Google searches show that the phrase “democracy promotion” does not begin to appear in English-language books until the early 1990s.⁵³ Instead, the field was born out of a debate over whether to advance human rights through states or above them and then subsequent efforts by HR groups to boundary police their field to keep this new approach, which came to be identified as democracy promotion, out.

The Reagan administration in the U.S. was a turning point. Initially, Reagan voiced little concern about human rights or democracy and planned to dismantle the new Human Rights Bureau at the State Department.⁵⁴ Yet in late 1981, Elliott Abrams, the eventual Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, drafted a memo on “Human Rights Policy” that was leaked to the New York Times.⁵⁵ Calling for a break with Carter’s focus on individual rights violations, Abrams argued that redefining human rights as “political rights and civil liberties” would give the U.S. “the best opportunity to convey what is ultimately at issue in our contest with the Soviet bloc.”⁵⁶ This conceptualization placed human rights within interstate politics rather than above them.

New American non-state organizations were then formed that referenced democracy explicitly in their names and mission statements. In the U.S., Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983, a quasi-private grant-making foundation. New NGOs – including the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) – were founded to help implement its programming. Although these organizations referenced the pursuit of human rights as part of their missions, leading HR NGOs regarded them skeptically, and began to emphasize and police a boundary. In an internal memo from February 1986, for example, AIUSA board member Ann Blyberg argued that the Reagan administration’s conceptualization of rights and democracy is not “just a quarrel about semantics” but instead “an attack on the entire post-World War II consensus about the nature and importance of human rights” and “the very basis for AI’s existence and its means of survival.”⁵⁷ Indeed, HR activists were described as “traumatized” by what they viewed as the cooptation of their cause.⁵⁸ Their vision, wherein democracy was nested within a larger menu of fundamental rights, had been turned on its head. With time, these new organizations would therefore coalesce into a distinct field of democracy promotion.⁵⁹

1990s Until Present: A Boundary Solidifies

In the 1990s and early 2000s, democracy promotion expanded its activities in response to the third wave of democratization. Part of the field’s expansion involved its growing internationalism, although there was substantial growth in the U.S., as well.⁶⁰ Several new organizations followed the NED model, including the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in the United Kingdom in 1992 and the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy in 2000. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance was founded in 1995 in Stockholm with an emphasis on providing advice and research to support democratic transition and consolidation. Older actors like the West German political party foundations (Stiftungen) became affiliated with this growing DP effort.⁶¹

By the 2000s, the DP field was increasingly professionalized and consolidated, sometimes being referred to as the “democracy bureaucracy” or the “democracy establishment.”⁶² Its members were characterized by a distinct approach that falls within the “service delivery” NGO category, broadly defined: they implemented trainings and other on-the-ground programs in non-democratic or transitioning countries, sometimes in collaboration with governments. The field’s numbers were sufficient that one study of democracy promotion efforts in Russia after the Cold War described them as constituting “a virtual army of non-governmental organizations.”⁶³ The DP field also expanded during this time to include NGOs from newly-democratized states, which began to lead overseas programs sharing their experiences.⁶⁴

Meanwhile, the international legal architecture supporting democracy was strengthened during this time. Interestingly, however, its basis was still the human rights framework.⁶⁵ The 1993 Vienna Declaration on Human Rights claimed that democracy was a universal human right that countries were obliged to protect, and the UN Human Rights Committee adopted General Comment 25 in 1996, which specified state responsibilities regarding democratic freedoms and elections. National and global institutions emphasized democracy promotion in peacekeeping, conflict settlement, and foreign economic aid.⁶⁶

During this time, the HR field’s cosmopolitan orientation towards international law and individual rights violations became stronger and a differentiating feature. A mid-1990s survey of HR NGOs found that most had a primary goal of developing mechanisms for enforcing international standards and monitoring individual rights violations.⁶⁷ While HR NGOs pushed for new treaty laws, the UN moved from standard setting to implementation and enforcement.⁶⁸

HR NGOs also grew to be more interconnected with actors working on other issues during the 1990s and 2000s. Although HR practitioners focused on a relatively narrow slice of rights in the field’s early years, human rights work subsequently expanded, moving towards the economic rights concerns of the development field.⁶⁹ Leading HR NGOs such as AI devoted attention to events such as famines, reflecting a growing concern with poverty and sustainable development.⁷⁰ Similarly, the human rights and humanitarianism fields, which were once disconnected, began to overlap.⁷¹ Some critics bemoaned a “gross inflation” in the number of international human rights instruments – and yet democracy promotion was kept at a distance.⁷² As one subject observed, “[s]o much else has changed, and very quickly, within the human rights field. And yet that dynamic, that relationship between democracy and human rights in the thinking and planning of human rights organizations – I don’t think that has changed.”⁷³

Priests Versus Kings: An Ideological Explanation

Although an array of factors may shape an actor’s calculations at any time, we argue that the origins of the durable boundary between human rights and democracy promotion lies in ideology, or “a set of beliefs governing conduct.”⁷⁴ This argument draws on IR research on actors’ preferences, including research on how NGOs’ preferences, shaped by their network positions, explain the outcomes of transnational campaigns and advocacy.⁷⁵ An ideological explanation locates actors’ preferences about boundaries in their fundamental visions about how the world does and should work.

Ideological differences may encompass aspects of both partisan and left-right divisions, but they are not reducible to only domestic or partisan differences. For example, the ideological differences that interest us are not contained within a single country. Clashes between competing transnational advocacy networks over gay rights, for example, occur globally.⁷⁶ Similar divides exist in our case, where the HR and DP sectors transcend national boundaries. Ideological differences also remain powerful across a long time period and during two critical moments: the end of the Cold War, and the eight-year Democratic U.S. presidential administration of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, which was – similar to Reagan – strongly committed to democracy promotion and contributed to its emergence as a world value.⁷⁷

Ideological divisions are salient even within narrowly-defined communities, such as actors that are all committed to protecting equal human dignity and advancing individual freedoms in our case. Boundary policing occurs because it can be more challenging for organizations to get along with others that are relatively similar and yet still distinct ideologically than with others that are clearly different. We suggest there are both normative and strategic reasons why ideological differences matter so much for boundary policing. Such organizations may be in conflict due to a purely ideational “narcissism of small differences” that provokes dislike and distrust, and they may also feel a stronger need to differentiate themselves in order to win funding, attention, or other resources.

For HR and DP organizations, actors’ distinct preferences reflect fundamentally different priorities and understandings within the umbrella of liberalism. One informant offered a useful metaphor for highlighting the differences between the two fields. As described to us, human rights advocates and democracy promoters are as different as “priests” and “kings”: HR advocates “were always identifying what was wrong and what was right,” whereas DP groups “were about delivering [and] governing.”⁷⁸ These are two different orientations within the expansive world of “liberal” ideology. In the two fields, all members are committed to protecting equal human dignity and advancing individual freedoms, but HR advances a cosmopolitan liberalism while DP promotes a statist liberalism.⁷⁹

We argue that there is a boundary between HR and DP actors because of their different ideas about the nature of rights and how to advance them. The work of cosmopolitan HR groups focuses on those abused or neglected by the state (torture, human trafficking, anti-discrimination, sexual and reproductive rights) and prescribes the creation and implementation of international law as a remedy. Although rights protection could focus on states as the agents of rights protection, most HR groups understand states as part of the problem, not as part of the solution.⁸⁰

States are problematic in two ways in the cosmopolitan worldview of HR groups. First, states are the “usual suspects” in cases of rights violations. Second, states will always be imperfect as rights protectors, as even democracies violate human rights. The cosmopolitan project of human rights thus claimed to change global politics “not through political vision but by transcending politics.”⁸¹ Like priests, human rights groups have constructed “a sense of the sacred” around the idea of rights that are universally held by all.⁸² By contrast, DP groups embrace a statist ideology.⁸³ DP groups more often work on national institutions and processes (as with their efforts to promote elections, rule of law, constitutions, legislatures, and good governance). Through such work, they prescribe transformations in state structures, pursued through cooperation with state actors.

The core of both fields has remained surprisingly durable even as the global political landscape and material resource pool of each were transformed by key events such as the end of the Cold War, the third wave of democratization, and the Iraq invasion. Rights protection requires a protector, which is the state in liberal social contract theory. In the aggregate, democracy promotors argue that rights are better protected by democratic agents, however imperfect. In their programs, this goal may sometimes lead DP groups to work with governments to improve the quality and transparency of institutions (e.g., an election management body). At the same time, democracy promotion NGOs also cooperate with, fund, and train domestic NGOs that overlap with the typical local partners of human rights NGOs, such as dissident groups, women’s groups, or youth groups.

These different worldviews were activated by political events in the 1980s. Reagan’s “conservative human rights policy,” which involved a reinterpretation of the meaning of rights and democracy, presented a principled challenge to HR groups.⁸⁴ It crystallized HR actors’ conception of their work as separate from the statist approach of democracy promoters and prompted them to begin engaging in boundary policing. One observable implication of our argument that boundary policing resulted from ideological differences raised at this moment, which we will test below, is that policing should be more prevalent in the U.S. and Western Europe than in the countries often targeted by human rights and democracy promotion NGOs, since that is where the political differences are most salient.

This external challenge generated greater coherence among human rights groups. It was not enough for HR actors to continue to pursue their own approach during this time; instead, they sought to exclude this new democracy-promotion content. The “loosely structured human rights community” in the West began to coordinate activities among itself and criticized the U.S. government.⁸⁵ The stabilizing HR field was not hostile to democracy per se, but wanted to be free to critique all states, regardless of regime type, and activists were frustrated by the seemingly-instrumental employment of liberal principles to serve geopolitical interests. They accused the Reagan administration of being willing to ignore human rights abuses by allied governments and using human rights as a shield for policies such as its efforts to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.⁸⁶ Within this context, HR advocates sought to differentiate their work from that of the U.S. government, especially in Central America.⁸⁷ State Department officials working on human rights responded angrily; “lengthy, vituperative letters” between Elliott Abrams and Aryeh Neier, who was working with Americas Watch (an HRW predecessor) at the time, were said to have “filled the better part of a filing cabinet.”⁸⁸

The threat that DP could pose to core understandings of human rights continued to drive HR groups to protect their field, to the dismay of many DP advocates. The seeming distortion of core principles is captured by HRW’s Holly Burkhalter. She stated in 1994 that “the reason why the word ‘democracy’ gives…me the hives, is because it has been so exploited in years past.”⁸⁹ When the U.S. government changed the name of the State Department’s Bureau of “Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs” to the Bureau of “Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor” in 1998, there was backlash from the HR community. An Amnesty staffer, James O’Dea, “warned against treating democratization and human rights policy as interchangeable policy labels.”⁹⁰ On the other side of the field boundary, some DP advocates decried HR organizations’ hostility. Years later, Elliott Abrams continued to argue that it is “absurd and unrealistic” to pursue human rights as many HR NGOs like AI do without more regard for the overarching political context.⁹¹

An Illustration: Freedom House and Amnesty International

To illustrate the dynamics of boundary policing, we offer a close look at the interaction between two key players, Freedom House and Amnesty International. We selected these two groups for three reasons. First, while they are not necessarily representative of each field, they are influential in shaping the general relationship between HR and DP and therefore worthy of careful case study.⁹² Second, given the organizations’ importance, archival materials and other relevant sources are available to researchers, which shed important light on historical decision making. Third, both organizations were founded before the HR-DP boundary emerged, which facilitates our study of change over time. Both initially thought of themselves (and were thought of by others) as HR organizations, but the contest over the meaning of human rights led to Freedom House’s move to the DP field.

Freedom House was founded in 1941 to support American involvement in World War II, and was once described as “America’s oldest human rights NGO.”⁹³ After the war, the organization focused on fighting communism and supporting civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad.⁹⁴ Yet today, democracy occupies a prominent place in the organization’s identity. Its mission statement begins: “Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world.”⁹⁵ Its contemporary reputation is generally for working on DP rather than HR. As one HR activist told us, “No, I do not think of Freedom House as a human rights organization.”⁹⁶

The shift for Freedom House from HR to DP was gradual. When Amnesty was founded in 1961, Freedom House saw its work as focused on human rights, and Amnesty saw a potential partner. In fact, the first meeting of Amnesty in the United States was held at Freedom House’s offices in New York.⁹⁷ AI’s 1965-66 annual report described the visit by founder Peter Benenson to Freedom House as successful.⁹⁸

Despite this early cooperation, the seeds of ideological difference that would grow into boundary policing in the 1980s were evident. AI’s early work on prisoners of conscience could have been linked to democracy, but the organization adopted a cosmopolitan vision positioned above both state regimes and interstate conflict. In the Cold War, Amnesty portrayed itself as apolitical, adopting causes in the communist and capitalist worlds and refusing to speak on the desirability of a particular regime type.⁹⁹ In contrast, Freedom House preferred working through state institutions. It positioned itself as bi-partisan (not non-partisan) and viewed opposition to communism abroad as part of its mission.¹⁰⁰ Still, before the HR-DP boundary emerged, Freedom House was part of the human rights field. For example, Freedom House representatives attended the 1977 National Conference on Human Rights (though some other attendees criticized Freedom House for focusing on Cold War politics).¹⁰¹

The boundary between these two organizations hardened as the political environment made their ideological differences more salient. When Elliott Abrams’ 1981 memo was leaked to the New York Times, Freedom House was pleased that “the Reagan administration had followed the Freedom House line.”¹⁰² The disconnect between the two NGOs grew. In a 1983 letter to a supporter, Freedom House executive director Leonard Sussman wrote:

We are quite different from Amnesty International.

Freedom House believes that the structure of governments determines their treatment of their own citizens and their foreign policies. Consequently, we strive to increase the level of political rights and civil liberties within countries. Amnesty does not try to affect structural change, but deals mainly with the inhumane treatment of citizens and others. We take such factors into account, of course, but place major emphasis on long-term structural change.¹⁰³

Freedom House presented reform of state institutions as the path to rights protection, which it contrasted with Amnesty’s (narrower and more short-term) focus on individuals.

While Freedom House was trying to carve out a unique identity, Amnesty and other HR organizations were sharply critical of Freedom House. Freedom House’s support of Reagan’s anti-communist policies in Latin America drew condemnation from HR organizations such as Helsinki Watch.¹⁰⁴ One individual active in Helsinki Watch at the time remarked, “They had an orientation that was different from ours. They weren’t even trying to be neutral. They’re biased. I think their ratings always are friendly towards pro-American governments.”¹⁰⁵

Today, the cosmopolitan/statist divide shapes the NGOs’ strategies in both information dissemination and fundraising. In terms of information dissemination, Freedom House’s annual reports rate states’ performance on political rights and civil liberties, whereas Amnesty’s annual reports “name and shame” states or people that have violated specific individuals’ rights. In terms of fundraising, Amnesty has insisted on financial independence from government sources.¹⁰⁶ For Freedom House, private donations initially made up the bulk its support, but government grants became an important revenue source in the 1980s.¹⁰⁷ This new funding helped Freedom House become a key player in the new DP field and expand its overseas programs to include trainings and capacity building for local NGOs. Freedom House’s acceptance of government funding and willingness to work with governments were both cited by HR activists we spoke to as evidence that Freedom House is not really an HR organization.¹⁰⁸

The initial meeting of Amnesty USA at Freedom House offered a path that was not taken. The disjuncture between the two groups may seem self-evident today, but it was not inevitable. Their different ideological commitments led to the formation of two liberal projects, one individualistic and international in orientation, the other focused on national regimes and amenable to collaboration with states.

Divisions at the Top: The Global Reach of the Boundary

In studies of global governance, the concept of a “global field” is an abstraction – in actuality, the reach of fields is uneven. Although principled priests and pragmatic kings exist around the globe, the salience of ideological differences is much higher at international NGOs such as Freedom House or HRW – which are normally headquartered in advanced industrial democracies and whose staff have the luxury of choice regarding where and how to protect rights – than it is at domestic NGOs.

For many domestic NGOs, protecting rights and advancing democracy are part of the same desperate local struggle. Many NGOs in illiberal countries have long seen themselves as working on both HR and DP. This pattern is clear from historical accounts of the two fields in Central and Eastern Europe. During the 1980s, for example, Helsinki Watch offshoots in Poland and Russia were eager to access funding from the NED, despite it being a Reagan DP initiative.¹⁰⁹ This openness to working across the HR-DP divide occurred at the same time as tensions flared in the United States between leaders of Helsinki Watch and people in the nascent DP community, including the NED. Meanwhile, leaders within the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity movement in Poland similarly collaborated with both Helsinki Watch and the NED.¹¹⁰ The producers of samizdat, which were dissident pamphlets documenting human rights abuses and considered to be an important part of the transnational human rights movement, also sought and received NED funding.¹¹¹ Post-Cold War research on the former Soviet region continued to emphasize the interest that human rights activists and organizations there had in collaborating with international supporters to engage in activities such as election monitoring, even those such programs are more associated with democracy promotion in Western capitals.¹¹²

This cooperation in actual practice makes the HR-DP boundary that emerged in Washington and elsewhere even more puzzling, as it would seem to impede deeper collaboration. Consider the frustration we heard during an exchange with a leader at OSF, which supports both HR and DP groups:

Subject: In most places where we are working, democracy and human rights are not at odds. We are calling for more democracy, more effective enforcement, and protection of human rights. We don’t see them as in tension.

Interviewer: I think for us that’s part of the puzzle. From talking to activists in the field, they don’t necessarily see a meaningful distinction…

Subject: Yeah. Because people in the field have to deal with reality. And the reality is these problems are across the spectrum, and they can’t be encompassed in either term by themselves. That’s the reality. We know that.¹¹³

In this telling, functional concerns about how to best enhance participation and protect rights are impeded, not improved, by a boundary between the two fields. The division is not necessary or natural, but it is a durable reflection of very different worldviews.

In advancing an explanation for boundary policing that is based on key actors’ ideological commitments, we recognize that both practical and normative calculations shape NGOs’ strategic choices.¹¹⁴ As the earlier quote from the Amnesty staffer illustrates, HR organizations saw the alternate ideological framing of human rights that was offered by DP organizations as both normatively undesirable and a threat to their resource base. Thus, it is entirely possible that boundary policing by HR actors was in part a strategic response to an external threat. As we argue below, however, a concern for access to resources alone cannot account for boundary policing in the 1990s and 2000s.

Alternate Explanations

To develop alternate accounts of boundary policing, we draw upon existing theories of global governance to identify three factors – functional necessity, resource dependence, and historical sequencing – that might account for disconnected fields. While each account has virtues, we argue below that the ideological explanation is most sound.

Functional Necessity

Functionalist accounts of NGOs assume that organizational strategies “advance a particular goal or meet a particular organizational need.”¹¹⁵ For example, Barnett explains the pre-1990s disjuncture between the human rights and humanitarianism fields as rooted in their distinct foci: humanitarianism was concerned with threats to basic needs and human life, whereas human rights was concerned with a lack of entitlements.¹¹⁶

Functionalists might expect fields to be disconnected if their goals differ or conflict. Yet human rights and democracy are closely related as normative ideals. Democracy can be defined minimally or maximally; when defined minimally, democracy is nested within human rights.¹¹⁷ Most democracy promoters conceptualize democracy in broader terms, however, entailing participatory and free self-governance, which makes democracy synonymous with human rights.¹¹⁸ HR activists recognize this normative connection: as one long-time HR expert – who was initially surprised by our interest in the relationship between the HR and DP fields – put it in an interview with us, “If you break down human rights and democracy into their basic principles, they are more or less the same at their core. They’re both fundamentally about participation, non-discrimination, and basic respect for the person.”¹¹⁹ Thus, HR and DP have at least complementary and potentially even identical goals.

In practice, democracy and rights protection are also strongly correlated.¹²⁰ Democracies are more likely to ratify human rights treaties, perhaps because they find it easier to comply with such treaties’ obligations.¹²¹ Ex ante, then, functionalism implies that HR advocates will support the spread of democracy. Instead, they show ambivalence, reminding their audiences that democracies also violate rights.

Alternately, perhaps the “competent actions” necessary to achieve the same goal are different.¹²² One could argue that human rights are more grounded in international law than democracy, which might demand closer work with IOs.¹²³ Yet democracy is explicitly called for in international human rights law, as in the Charter of the Organization of American States, the UDHR, the Statute of the Council of Europe, and the ICCPR.¹²⁴ The founders of the UDHR and the ECHR were committed both to individual rights and democratic practice.¹²⁵ As Morsink writes, “the drafters of the Declaration had no doubts about these political rights as being genuine human rights. The experience of the war had reinforced their belief that the cluster of rights spelled out in Articles 18, 19, 20, and 21 are universally the first ones dictators will seek to deny and destroy.”¹²⁶ Leaders in the HR field are well-aware of these international legal protections, as illustrated earlier.

Another possibility is that the two fields must take different approaches to working in illiberal states out of functional necessity. Perhaps boundary policing emerged because the strategies necessary for goal achievement are in opposition, where one must cooperate with states while another is confrontational. For example, HR groups might improve their access to HR-violating regimes if they clarify via boundary policing that they are not interested in regime change. Boundaries could thus reflect “a pragmatic calculation of what is required to maintain the NGO’s operations in a non-democratic country.”¹²⁷

This explanation also has problems. Practitioners disagree about which field’s strategy meets more resistance from illiberal governments. Some HR groups claim their neutrality enhances their access, because states see groups like AI as impartial arbiters of competing interests.¹²⁸ Others argue that HR activists’ confrontational approach limits cooperation with governments. As one long-time HR leader told us, “people who are engaged with democracy promotion come in already with huge amounts of access compared with human rights organizations… And yet they are the organizations that tend to water things down in order to collaborate with governments.”¹²⁹ Thus, democracy promotion may be more “tame” than human rights, requiring greater compromise with the target state.¹³⁰

In addition, for this argument to be correct, we should observe states that are targeted by transnational pressure related to human rights and democracy distinguishing between the two fields. Yet the boundary between the HR and DP fields has little meaning to those target states. In the early 1990s, differentiation between the fields appeared “formalistic at best” to targeted governments.¹³¹ More recently, the restrictions on NGOs that have been adopted in countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, and Russia have targeted both external HR and DP organizations.¹³² Although HR groups might have initially miscalculated about which strategy would be most effective at granting them access to target states, a functionalist account would imply eventual learning by HR organizations seeking to effectively achieve their goal of advancing human rights.

Resource Dependence

A second driver of boundary policing might be donor preferences. The key actors in each field are nonprofit organizations, which means that relationships with their funders – whether states, foundations, or individual donors – are vital to their survival. Resource dependency scholars see the reliance on external sources of funding as driving NGO behavior.¹³³ Thus, boundary policing might be more likely to emerge when actors are competing to access common funding.¹³⁴ Since boundary policing is primarily coming from human rights, resource dependency theory implies that the boundary is in their best financial interest.

In fact, democracy promotion has not only not threatened the largely private donor pool of HR groups, it has been associated with new sources of funding. Human rights organizations rely heavily on private donors. There is no single account of financial support for the global HR field, but private foundations have been instrumental in its development.¹³⁵ In 2016, foundation giving to human rights totaled $2.8 billion.¹³⁶ The large HR NGOs like Amnesty and HRW have also been able to cultivate support from private citizens. By contrast, democracy promotion is overwhelmingly dependent on official donors. Foreign aid for democracy was under $1 billion in the late 1980s but more than $10 billion in 2015.¹³⁷ Over the past several decades, official donors have expanded HR foreign aid, but DP aid has ballooned in comparison. The increase in government funding for democracy promotion should not be taken as an indicator that democracy promotion was uniformly embraced applied within donor states’ foreign policies; indeed, democracy promotion is often advanced in a selective way, with states and IOs pushing more for democracy when it is compatible with their other objectives.¹³⁸ Nevertheless, the growth in resources for DP organizations is an important force that has enabled them to expand their work globally.

The expanding resource pool is perhaps most evident when we compare data on official aid to HR and DP from the same source. Figure 2 shows total official aid to various subsectors within and across the two fields as reported to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For simplicity, we combine five DP subsectors to display alongside HR aid and several subsectors that span both fields.¹³⁹ As we can see, official government aid for subsectors related to democracy have grown much more between 2002 and 2018 than the funding for human rights.

Figure 2

If resource mobilization is key to organizational success, we would expect HR organizations to embrace democracy promotion to access these funds. Although issues like women’s rights, media freedoms, are civil society are taken up by actors in both fields, resource dependency would predict more work by HR groups on topics like elections, judicial development, and decentralization. We do not observe such a shift.

In addition, HR NGOs in the global North have policed the boundary with democracy promotion despite the preferences of some foundation and government donors there, many of whom prefer a close relationship between the two fields. The NED – a DP foundation – has funded many NGOs active in HR, and the OSF, “the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights,” funds organizations in both fields.¹⁴⁰ Government funders in Europe have exhibited similar preferences. Since the late 1980s, for example, the EU has taken up human rights and democracy as a basket of shared concerns in its external relations and foreign aid, and the EIDHR, established in 1994, has provided roughly €100 million a year.¹⁴¹ In the U.S., “rule of law/human rights” is a type of democracy aid, and a preference for closer collaboration is reflected in the organizational structure of various agencies, including the “Human Rights and Democracy” fund established in 1998 and the “Center for Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance” established in 2012.¹⁴² These attempts to reorder the field boundaries have had limited success, however.¹⁴³ The EIDHR has abandoned its efforts to treat the two fields as one. A 2017 external evaluation described how the “interwoven” pursuit of democracy and human rights from 2007-13 had created “grey zones” and other problems, so the two objectives were separated in 2014.¹⁴⁴

Finally, it is possible that HR groups’ boundary policing follows the preferences of private citizen donors, who are a prominent funding source for HR but not DP organizations. There are four problems with this explanation. First, although AI and HRW have many private supporters, other HR NGOs have struggled to gain public attention and rely on large foundations for revenue.¹⁴⁵ The preferences of foundations such as Ford and OSF should matter more for most HR NGOs. Second, large numbers of small donors face a collective action problem in coordinating to express their preferences and drive HR NGOs’ strategies. Third, in a representative survey of human rights perceptions among publics in Mexico, Morocco, India, and Nigeria, respondents equally associated “human rights” with protecting people from violence, promoting free and fair elections, and promoting socioeconomic justice.¹⁴⁶ In other words, it seems that citizens perceive an overlap between human rights and democracy. Finally, HR NGOs have diversified with revenue streams to maintain operational independence.¹⁴⁷ Even if some individual donors prefer to exclusively support human rights, there is substantial financial incentive for HR NGOs to embrace DP work.

Sequencing

Historical institutionalism (HI) understands fields as defined by the dynamics that emerge during critical junctures and are institutionalized over time. While new fields might emerge in moments of disruption, HI sees most change as incremental within existing institutions.¹⁴⁸ Institutions reinforce the power of the privileged groups that created them,¹⁴⁹ so resistance to new fields should emerge when powerful actors feel threatened. Here, boundary policing could reflect a disconnect among the prior institutional arrangements onto which they were grafted.

The HI account has many strengths, as sequencing helps account for the consolidation of different ideological positions. Just as the HR field was consolidating around a cosmopolitan ethos focused on promoting individual rights through international law, the Reagan administration tried to redefine human rights as subservient to democracy and as a goal to be pursued within interstate politics. The disconnect that resulted was later institutionalized. This pattern is consistent with path dependence, as newly powerful actors (Western HR organizations) defended their ideological commitments and their position at the center of the field by excluding new DP organizations. Arguably, the differentiation between the fields is now seen as specialization more than “antagonism.”

Yet HI does less well in explaining why some moments are critical junctures while others are not. The end of the Cold War could have redefined the relationship between human rights and democracy promotion in a radically different way. The underlying landscape for HR and DP shifted dramatically, with a third wave of democratization, rise in subnational violence that led to new forms of international interventions, and expansion in IOs. Yes, there were tensions between HR and DP in the U.S. in the 1990s, but the actors in and the content of in the nascent DP field transformed in the early 1990s. Long-time DP consultant Lincoln Mitchell argues that, since the end of the Cold War, “the institutionalization of democracy promotion efforts has included an internationalization of democracy promotion…[it] is far from an entirely, or even largely, American enterprise.”¹⁵⁰ According to McFaul, democracy promotion became a “world value” after the Cold War.¹⁵¹ In addition, the growing DP field shifted towards the rule of law promotion, based on a broad Western (rather than exclusively American) consensus.¹⁵² Practitioners working on the rule of law see local capacity building, access to justice, and institutional reform as part of the reforms necessary to realize both democracy and human rights.¹⁵³

If ever there were a critical juncture for the promotion of global liberalism, the end of the Cold War would seem to be it. Yet boundary policing by HR continued, as evident in a 1993 speech by former AI Secretary General Ian Martin at Harvard Law School:

The new world order seems to present the human rights movement with a beguiling prospect. Powerful government no longer inhibited by powerful adversaries stand ready, it appears, to make the promotion of human rights a centerpiece of their foreign policies… [T]his is a prospect which the human rights movement should view coolly… It should not identify itself with the new Western rhetoric of “democracy, human rights and the free market economy.”¹⁵⁴

The cosmopolitan commitment to protecting individual rights violations was kept distant from democracy promotion, even as DP became a bipartisan cause in the U.S. and further incorporated into global governance institutions.

Conclusion

Over five decades, the HR field has expanded its scope. While its commitment to international law and individual rights has deepened, HR actors have reexamined and softened their boundary with some proximate fields such as development and humanitarianism. Yet this more-open orientation has not extended to democracy promotion. The fear that human rights could be coopted to serve state interests or support regime change remains potent within leading HR organizations – and drives a persistent use of boundary policing.

The narrative above describes the emergence and evolution of the two fields in relation to one another. Alone, this is an important sphere in global governance and a useful case study for illustrating the process of boundary construction and maintenance. The analysis here also offers insight into three bigger questions: how and why field boundaries emerge, competition among fields and its effects, and the contemporary crisis of global liberalism.

First, across the many issues that together make up global politics, boundaries are dynamic. The security field now includes human security; development professionals have expanded into climate change mitigation; environmentalists increasingly pay attention to gender. The story of human rights and democracy promotion focuses our attention on where fields stop, with two lessons. One is that field boundaries may have little to do with functional demands or donor preferences. The building and maintenance of boundaries emerge over time and in response to new political and institutional dynamics. The other is that IOs are necessary but not sufficient for the construction of field boundaries. Democracy and human rights are intimately connected in international law. Yet actors in the HR community layered on much more, prioritizing certain rights and highlighting their cosmopolitan orientation. These choices, and the later boundary with the DP field, were not determined by international law or organization.

Next, our research offers insight into a second important concern: competition among fields and its effects. NGO competition is thought to be on the rise and as an important source of dysfunction among international NGOs, including problems associated with coordination and corruption that prevent these organizations from achieving their lofty goals of human progress.¹⁵⁵ Yet whereas previous research has focused on competition between individual organizations, we shift focus to competition between overall fields of NGOs. One important lesson is that competition looks more or less severe depending on the value of the boundary to the field. For DP groups, the exclusionary claims of HR groups have been resisted and drawn ire, but boundary policing did not pose an existential threat. Support for the DP field came first from a powerful state and later from the increased demand for international democracy promotion activities after the Cold War’s end. The importance of the boundary is much greater for HR groups. Unable to prevent DP organizations from using the language of rights, they must continually advance their preferred definition of human rights and exclude democracy promotion from their field.

Crucially, the implications of field-level competition stretch beyond dysfunctional outcomes at the level of individual programs. Indeed, the competition that drove boundary policing by HR NGOs is not over a semantic quarrel. The durable disjuncture that resulted from boundary policing shapes the content and size of the political coalitions advocating for HR and DP and the strategies they use. Recently these effects have been evident in how global human rights groups have responded to the Trump Administration’s announcement of a Commission on Unalienable Rights that seeks to ground human rights work in a natural law tradition. Hundreds of human rights groups signed a letter in June 2019 that defended international law, critiqued the U.S. government and autocratic regimes, and challenged the natural law approach of the Commission’s charge. Conspicuously absent from the signatories were core organizations from the democracy promotion community, including Freedom House, IRI, and NDI. Well-policed field boundaries define the range of possible coalitions that emerge in response to new concerns.

Finally, our research offers insight into the seeming crisis of global liberalism today. The field that prioritizes the protection of individual rights is narrower than the content of the UDHR implies. Critics of human rights have long characterized the field as too focused on political rights and civil liberties at the expense of economic and social considerations.¹⁵⁶ Though they do not use the language of boundary policing, these critics essentially show how the HR movement has policed its boundary on the left to exclude economic and social rights, especially during its early days. With a different perspective, our research shows the field is narrower than those critics claim. HR has also policed its boundary on the right to exclude work on democracy, elections, and other issues that might otherwise be compatible with its traditional focus on political rights and civil liberties. As pundits debate the collapse of the liberal international order, this is critical evidence of the long-standing divisions among liberal actors. The human rights field is narrow and coherent, but the price paid for these boundaries is a disconnect with liberalism’s other proponents.

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1. In addition to the references, this manuscript has an accompanying set of annotations supported by the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University. Interested readers can find the annotations at [insert link here].↩︎

2. Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 158.↩︎

3. In other words, the boundary substantially precedes the renewed attention to and associated controversies surrounding democracy promotion that arose around 2003 invasion of Iraq. See Jonathan Monten, "The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy," International Security, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2005).↩︎

4. R. Charli Carpenter, "Vetting the Advocacy Agenda: Network Centrality and the Paradox of Weapons Norms," International Organization, Vol. 65, No. 1 (2011): 99.↩︎

5. Kenneth W. Abbott, Jessica F. Green, and Robert O. Keohane, "Organizational Ecology and Institutional Change in Global Governance," International Organization, Vol. 70, No. 2 (2016); Sarah Sunn Bush and Jennifer Hadden, "Density and Decline in the Founding of International NGOs in the United States," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 4 (2019).↩︎

6. Jennifer Hadden, Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Michael Barnett, "Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Practices of Humanity," International Theory, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2018); Denis Kennedy, "Humanitarianism Governed: Rules, Identity, and Exclusion in Relief Work," Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2019).↩︎

7. Andrew Moravcsik, "Active Citation: A Precondition for Replicable Qualitative Research," PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2010); Qualitative Data Repository, "Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) at a Glance," https://stage-aws-new.qdr.org/ati.↩︎

8. G. John Ikenberry, "The End of Liberal International Order?" International Affairs, Vol. 94, No. 1 (2018); John J. Mearsheimer, "Bound to Fail: the Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order," International Security, Vol. 43, No. 4 (2019).↩︎

9. Thomas Carothers, "Democracy and Human Rights: Policy Allies or Rivals?," The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1994): 119.↩︎

10. Jack Snyder, "Empowering Rights through Mass Movements, Religion, and Reform Parties," in Human Rights Futures, ed. Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 108-09.↩︎

11. Interview with (author), human rights expert, March 20, 2019.↩︎

12. Abbott, Green, and Keohane, "Organizational Ecology and Institutional Change in Global Governance."; Vincent Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).↩︎

13. Ole Jacob Sending, The Politics of Expertise: Competing for Authority in Global Governance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Emily Barman, "Varieties of Field Theory and the Sociology of the Non‐profit Sector," Sociology Compass, Vol. 10, No. 6 (2016); Pouliot, International Pecking Orders: The Politics and Practice of Multilateral Diplomacy.↩︎

14. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Richard Price, "Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines," International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 3 (1998); Alexander Cooley and James Ron, "The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action," International Security, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2002); Michael N. Barnett, "Humanitarianism Transformed," Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 3, No. 4 (2005); Joshua W. Busby, Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Carpenter, "Vetting the Advocacy Agenda: Network Centrality and the Paradox of Weapons Norms."; Sarah S. Stroup, Borders Among Activists: International NGOs in the United States, Britain, and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Wendy H. Wong, Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Amanda M. Murdie, "The Ties that Bind: A Network Analysis of Human Rights International Nongovernmental Organizations," British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2014); Sarah Sunn Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong, The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).↩︎

15. E.g., Barnett, "Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Practices of Humanity."↩︎

16. Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, A Theory of Fields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩︎

17. Ibid., 18.↩︎

18. R. Charli Carpenter, “Lost” Causes: Agenda Vetting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 5.↩︎

19. Hadden, Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change.↩︎

20. Clifford Bob, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).↩︎

21. Cooley and Ron, "The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action."↩︎

22. Dan Wang, Alessandro Piazza, and Sarah A. Soule, "Boundary-Spanning in Social Movements: Antecedents and Outcomes," Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 44(2018).↩︎

23. Jennifer Hadden, "Explaining Variation in Transnational Climate Change Activism: The Role of Inter-Movement Spillover," Global Environmental Politics, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2014).↩︎

24. Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change.↩︎

25. Jeffrey Kopstein, "The Transatlantic Divide Over Democracy Promotion," The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2006); Leonie Holthaus, "Is there Difference in Democracy Promotion? A Comparison of German and US Democracy Assistance in Transitional Tunisia," Democratization, Vol. 26, No. 7 (2019).↩︎

26. Thomas Carothers, "Democracy Assistance: Political vs. Developmental?," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2009): 18; Amichai Magen and Michael A. McFaul, "Introduction: American and European Strategies to Promote Democracy - Shared Values, Common Challenges, Divergent Tools?," in Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law: American and European Strategies, ed. Magen, Risse, and McFaul, Governance and Limited Statehood (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Christopher Hobson and Milja Kurki, "The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion," in The Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion, ed. Hobson and Kurki, Democratization Series (London: Routledge, 2011), 11.↩︎

27. William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “A Curious Grapevine” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Jr. Welch, Claude E., NGOs and Human Rights: Promise and Performance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).↩︎

28. Interview with (author), former leader of human rights organization, April 3, 2019.↩︎

29. Interview with (author), human rights expert, February 7, 2019.↩︎

30. Interview with (author), human rights expert, February 25, 2019.↩︎

31. Interview with (author), September 17, 2019.↩︎

32. Interview with (author), March 22, 2019.↩︎

33. Leonard Seabrooke, "Epistemic Arbitrage: Transnational Professional Knowledge in Action," Journal of Professions and Organization, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2014); Sending, The Politics of Expertise: Competing for Authority in Global Governance.↩︎

34. Michael O'Flaherty and George Ulrich, "The Professionalization of Human Rights Field Work," Journal of Human Rights Practice, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010).↩︎

35. Nicolas Guilhot, "Limiting Sovereignty or Producing Governmentality? Two Human Rights Regimes in U.S. Discourse," Constellations, Vol. 15, No. 4 (2008): 505.↩︎

36. Ibid., 507.↩︎

37. Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators, 48.↩︎

38. Interview with (author), Stiftungen expert, May 8, 2018.↩︎

39. Kristyan Benedict, “Syria: Military Intervention – Six Key Points,” AI, August 28, 2013; Kenneth Roth, “The New Syria Will Need Human Rights, Not Reprisals,” HRW, February 4, 2013; “Syria: The International Community Must Act Now. Horror Must Be Investigated,” FIDH, August 22, 2013.↩︎

40. Charles Dunne, “The Syrian Crisis: A Case for Greater U.S. Involvement,” Freedom House, March 14, 2013; Charles Dunne, “Time Running Out to Aid Syria’s Rebels,” CNN.com, July 3, 2013.↩︎

41. See UN Democracy Fund, Guidance Note of the Secretary General on Democracy, 2009; Human Rights Funders Network and Foundation Center, Working Definition of Human Rights Grantmaking, 2016; External Evaluation of the EIDHR (2014-mid 2017), Final Report, Volume 1, June 2017; Community of Democracies, COD Strategic Plan 2018-2023, pages 18-19. .↩︎

42. David L. Bosco, Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Christian Reus-Smit, Individual Rights and the Making of the International System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).↩︎

43. Beth A. Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights. International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).↩︎

44. Steven L.B. Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).↩︎

45. Welch, NGOs and Human Rights: Promise and Performance.↩︎

46. Jean H. Quataert, Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 94-95.↩︎

47. Cyrus Vance, "Human Rights and Foreign Policy," Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol. 7(1977): 223-24.↩︎

48. Mikael Madsen, "France, the UK, and the ‘Boomerang’ of the Internationalization of Human Rights," in Human Rights Brought Home: Socio-legal Perspectives on Human Rights in the National Context, ed. Halliday and Schmidt (Portland: Hart, 2004).↩︎

49. Aryeh Neier, The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 10.↩︎

50. Sandra Vogelgesang, "What Price Principle? - U.S. Policy on Human Rights," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 56, No. 4 (1978): 825.↩︎

51. Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Christine Min Wotipka, "Global Civil Society and the International Human Rights Movement: Citizen Participation in Human Rights International Nongovernmental Organizations," Social Forces, Vol. 83, No. 2 (2004): 94.↩︎

52. Kathryn Sikkink, Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 40.↩︎

53. Books published in English and digitized by Google Books are searchable at https://books.google.com/ngrams (accessed August 19, 2019).↩︎

54. Hauke Hartmann, "U.S. Human Rights Policy under Carter and Reagan, 1977-1981," Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2001): 425.↩︎

55. Barbara Crossette and Special to the New York Times, “Strong U.S. Human Rights Policy Urged in Memo Approved by Haig,” New York Times, November 5, 1981, p. A10.↩︎

56. Elliott Abrams, Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 40-41.↩︎

57. Ann Blyberg, “AIUSA Program Vis-à-vis the US Government, education on international human rights law,” February 23, 1986. Amnesty International of the USA Inc. National Office Records, Box II.3 38, Folder 2. Rare Books and Manuscripts Archive, Columbia University Library.↩︎

58. Hartmann, "U.S. Human Rights Policy under Carter and Reagan, 1977-1981," 403.↩︎

59. Michael Christensen, "Interpreting the Organizational Practices of North American Democracy Assistance," International Political Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2017).↩︎

60. In the United States, DP NGOs grew from 81 in 1995 to 376 in 2015. HR NGOs also grew, though less rapidly: from 71 to 168. Data extract from the National Center for Charitable Statistics.↩︎

61. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, "Foreign Political Aid: The German Political Foundations and their U.S. Counterparts," International Affairs, Vol. 67, No. 1 (1991).↩︎

62. Thomas O. Melia, "The Democracy Bureaucracy," The American Interest, Vol. 1, No. 4 (2006); Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators; Christensen, "Interpreting the Organizational Practices of North American Democracy Assistance," 150.↩︎

63. Sarah E. Mendelson, "Democracy Assistance and Political Transition in Russia: Between Success and Failure," International Security, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2001): 68.↩︎

64. Tsveta Petrova, From Solidarity to Geopolitics: Support for Democracy among Postcommunist States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17.↩︎

65. Lincoln A. Mitchell, The Democracy Promotion Paradox (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), 50-51.↩︎

66. Desha M. Girod, Stephen D. Krasner, and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, "Governance and Foreign Assistance: The Imperfect Translation of Ideas into Outcomes," in Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law: American and European Strategies, ed. Magen, Risse, and McFaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Nazneen Barma, The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-Conflict States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Aila M. Matanock, "Bullets for Ballots: Electoral Participation Provisions and Enduring Peace after Civil Conflict," International Security, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2017); "External Engagement: Explaining the Spread of Electoral Participation Provisions in Civil Conflict Settlements," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3 (2018).↩︎

67. Jackie Smith, Ron Pagnucco, and George A. Lopez, "Globalizing Human Rights: The Work of Transnational Human Rights NGOs in the 1990s," Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1998): 387.↩︎

68. Kerstin Martens, NGOs and the United Nations: Institutionalization, Professionalization, and Adaptation (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Julie Mertus, The United Nations and Human Rights: A Guide for a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Steve Charnovitz, "Nongovernmental Organizations and International Law," American Journal of International Law, Vol. 100, No. 2 (2006).↩︎

69. Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); Ellen Nelson and Paul J. Dorsey, "Who Practices Rights-Based Development? A Progress Report on Work at the Nexus of Human Rights and Development," World Development, Vol. 104(2018).↩︎

70. Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Making Human Rights a Reality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 154.↩︎

71. Barnett, "Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Practices of Humanity."↩︎

72. Jacob Mchangama and Guglielmo Verdirame, "The Danger of Human Rights Proliferation: When Defending Liberty, Less Is More," Foreign Affairs, Vol. (2013).↩︎

73. Interview with (author), February 25, 2019.↩︎

74. Oxford English Dictionary, 2020.↩︎

75. Andrew Moravcsik, "Taking Preferences Serious: A Liberal Theory of International Politics," International Organization, Vol. 51, No. 4 (1997); Carpenter, "Vetting the Advocacy Agenda: Network Centrality and the Paradox of Weapons Norms."; Wong, Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights; Carpenter, “Lost” Causes: Agenda Vetting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security.↩︎

76. Bob, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics.↩︎

77. Michael McFaul, "Democracy Promotion as a World Value," The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2004).↩︎

78. Interview with (author), Ford Foundation staffer, May 17, 2018.↩︎

79. There are additional ways to distinguish types of liberalism as it relates to foreign affairs, such as between the “negative liberal exemplarism” tradition vs. the “positive liberal crusading” tradition. See Brendan Rittenhouse Green, "Two Concepts of Liberty: U.S. Cold War Grand Strategies and the Liberal Tradition," International Security, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2012): 16. Arguably, both transnational human rights advocacy and democracy promotion fit best within the latter category, heightening our interest in the boundary between them.↩︎

80. Interview with (author), Ford Foundation staffer, May 17, 2018.↩︎

81. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 213.↩︎

82. Stephen Hopgood, "Moral Authority, Modernity, and the Politics of the Sacred," European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2009): 249.↩︎

83. The label “statist” may seem strange for a field in which US actors (who tend to be pro-civil society, anti-state) still play a large role. We use the term to highlight the different ontology of democracy promotion: rights protection happens at the state level and improves as state capacity and public participation increase.↩︎

84. Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, "“A Positive Track of Human Rights Policy”: Elliott Abrams, the Human Rights Bureau, and the Conceptualization of Democracy Promotion," in The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion, ed. Pee and Schmidli (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 40.↩︎

85. Tamar Jacoby, "The Reagan Turnaround on Human Rights," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 64, No. 5 (1986): 1070.↩︎

86. Jack Donnelly, "Human Rights in the New World Order," World Policy Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1992): 275; Jeri Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), 128; Neier, The International Human Rights Movement: A History, 185.↩︎

87. Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America, 157.↩︎

88. Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement, 168.↩︎

89. See “Oversight of the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1993 and U.S. Human Rights Policy,” Hearings, February 1 and May 10, 1994, United States Congress House Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations, and Human Rights of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 103rd Congress, 2nd Session. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1994.↩︎

90. Hartmann, "U.S. Human Rights Policy under Carter and Reagan, 1977-1981," 403.↩︎

91. Abrams, Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring, 55-56.↩︎

92. John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 214.↩︎

93. Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “A Curious Grapevine”, 443.↩︎

94. Sarah Sunn Bush, "The Politics of Rating Freedom: Ideological Affinity, Private Authority, and the Freedom in the World Ratings," Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2017): 716.↩︎

95. Available at https://freedomhouse.org/about-us (accessed on July 2, 2020).↩︎

96. Interview with (author), human rights expert, February 25, 2019.↩︎

97. Sarah B. Snyder, "Exporting Amnesty International to the United States: Transatlantic Human Rights Activism in the 1960s," Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2012): 784.↩︎

98. Amnesty International Annual Report, June 1, 1965 – May 31, 1966. Available at https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/204000/pol100011966eng.pdf (accessed on October 12, 2018).↩︎

99. Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 97-101; Jan Eckel, "The International League for the Rights of Man, Amnesty International, and the Changing Fate of Human Rights Activism from the 1940s through the 1970s," Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2013).↩︎

100. Leonard R. Sussman, "Freedom House," in Encyclopedia of Human Rights, ed. Forsythe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 277; Carl J. Bon Tempo, "From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s," in The Human Rights Revolution: An International History, ed. Iryie, Goedde, and Hitchcock (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 226.↩︎

101. "From the Center-Right: Freedom House and Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s," 223.↩︎

102. Ibid., 235.↩︎

103. Leonard Sussman, “Letter to Lawrence Dunn, November 3, 1983,” Freedom House Records, Box 39, Folder 2, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Used by Permission of the Princeton University Library.↩︎

104. Sussman, "Freedom House," 277.↩︎

105. Interview with (author), human rights expert, March 20, 2019.↩︎

106. Snyder, "Exporting Amnesty International to the United States: Transatlantic Human Rights Activism in the 1960s," 792.↩︎

107. Bush, "The Politics of Rating Freedom: Ideological Affinity, Private Authority, and the Freedom in the World Ratings," 720.↩︎

108. Interview with (author), human rights expert, February 25, 2019.↩︎

109. 1989 Annual Report of the National Endowment for Democracy, p. 22. Available at http://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/annualreports/1989-ned-annual-report.pdf (accessed August 17, 2018).↩︎

110. Laber, The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement, 141-48.↩︎

111. 1988 Annual Report of the National Endowment for Democracy, p. 21. Available at http://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/annualreports/1988-ned-annual-report.pdf (accessed August 17, 2018).↩︎

112. E.g., Mendelson, "Democracy Assistance and Political Transition in Russia: Between Success and Failure," 88.↩︎

113. Interview with (author), Open Society Foundations staffer, September 17, 2019.↩︎

114. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics; Cooley and Ron, "The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action."; Jr. Hill, Daniel W., Will H. Moore, and Bumba Mukherjee, "Information Politics Versus Organizational Incentives: When Are Amnesty International’s “Naming and Shaming” Reports Biased?," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 2 (2013).↩︎

115. Anna Ohanyan, "Network Institutionalism and NGO Studies," International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2012): 375.↩︎

116. Barnett, "Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Practices of Humanity," 325.↩︎

117. Jack Donnelly, "Human Rights, Democracy, and Development," Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1999): 619.↩︎

118. Ibid., 621; Milja Kurki, Democratic Futures: Revisioning Democracy Promotion (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 18; Johan Karlsson Schaffer, "The Co-Originality of Human Rights and Democracy in an International Order," International Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2015): 96; Todd Landman, "Democracy and Human Rights: Concepts, Measures, and Relationships," Politics and Governance, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2018).↩︎

119. Interview with (author), human rights expert, February 7, 2019.↩︎

120. Sikkink, Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century, 193.↩︎

121. Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights. International Law in Domestic Politics; Hafner-Burton, Making Human Rights a Reality.↩︎

122. Barnett, "Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Practices of Humanity," 316.↩︎

123. Donnelly, "Human Rights, Democracy, and Development," 612-13; Landman, "Democracy and Human Rights: Concepts, Measures, and Relationships," 50.↩︎

124. Roland Rich, "Bringing Democracy into International Law," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2001): 21-22.↩︎

125. Eleanor Roosevelt, "The Struggle for Human Rights," https://erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu/struggle-human-rights-1948; Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).↩︎

126. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 69.↩︎

127. Snyder, "Empowering Rights through Mass Movements, Religion, and Reform Parties," 108-09.↩︎

128. Bronwyn Leebaw, "The Politics of Impartial Activism: Humanitarianism and Human Rights," Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007); Hopgood, "Moral Authority, Modernity, and the Politics of the Sacred."↩︎

129. Interview with (author), human rights expert, February 25, 2019.↩︎

130. Bush, The Taming of Democracy Assistance: Why Democracy Promotion Does Not Confront Dictators; Erin A. Snider, "US Democracy Aid and the Authoritarian State: Evidence from Egypt and Morocco," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 4 (2018).↩︎

131. Carothers, "Democracy and Human Rights: Policy Allies or Rivals?," 112.↩︎

132. Darin Christensen and Jeremy Weinstein, "Defunding Dissent: Restrictions on Aid to NGOs," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2013): 78; Alexander Cooley and Matthew Schaaf, "Grounding the Backlash: Regional Security Treaties, Counternorms, and Human Rights in Eurasia," in Human Rights Futures, ed. Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 160.↩︎

133. Cooley and Ron, "The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action."; Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion Insurgents, Media, and International Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Aseem Prakash and Mary Kay Gugerty, eds., Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).↩︎

134. Stephen Hopgood and Leslie Vinjamuri, "Faith in Markets," in Sacred Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism, ed. Barnett and Stein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Tana Johnson, "Cooperation, Co-optation, Competition, Conflict: International Bureaucracies and Non-Governmental Organizations in an Interdependent World," Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 23, No. 5 (2016).↩︎

135. Smith, Pagnucco, and Lopez, "Globalizing Human Rights: The Work of Transnational Human Rights NGOs in the 1990s."; Welch, NGOs and Human Rights: Promise and Performance.↩︎

136. Candid and Human Rights Funder’s Network, Advancing Human Rights (2019), available at https://humanrightsfunding.org/reports/.↩︎

137. Thomas Carothers, "Democracy Aid at 25: Time to Choose," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2015): 60.↩︎

138. Arman Grigoryan, "Selective Wilsonianism: Material Interests and the West’s Support for Democracy," International Security, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2020).↩︎

139. The DP subsectors are legislatures and political parties, elections, legal and judicial development, decentralization and support to subnational governments, and public policy and administrative management. The issue categorization from Figure 1 does not perfectly align with OECD categories. We treat legal and judicial development as “constitutions” and “rule of law,” and treat public policy and administrative management as “governance.”↩︎

140. “Who We Are,” available at https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/who-we-are (accessed July 15, 2019).↩︎

141. Tanja A. Börzel and Thomas Risse, "Venus Approaching Mars? The European Union’s Approaches to Democracy Promotion in Comparative Perspective," in Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law, ed. Magen, Risse, and McFaul (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 14.↩︎

142. Congressional Research Service, "Democracy Promotion: An Objective of U.S. Foreign Assistance," (2019), 6, 9.↩︎

143. Rosa Sánchez-Salgado, "Giving a European Dimension to Civil Society Organizations," Journal of Civil Society, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2009): 348.↩︎

144. External Evaluation of the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (2014-mid 2017), Final Report, Volume 1, June 2017, p. 17.↩︎

145. Stroup, Borders Among Activists: International NGOs in the United States, Britain, and France.↩︎

146. James Ron et al., Taking Root: Human Rights and Public Opinion in the Global South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 46-50.↩︎

147. George E. Mitchell, "Strategic Responses to Resource Dependence Among Transnational NGOs Registered in the United States," VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2014).↩︎

148. Giovanni Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen, "The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narratives, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism," World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2007); Orfeo Fioretos, "Historical Institutionalism in International Relations," International Organization, Vol. 65, No. 2 (2011).↩︎

149. "Historical Institutionalism in International Relations," 388.↩︎

150. Mitchell, The Democracy Promotion Paradox, 77.↩︎

151. McFaul, "Democracy Promotion as a World Value."↩︎

152. Frank Schimmelfennig, "A Comparison of the Rule of Law Promotion Policies of Major Western Powers," in Rule of Law Dynamics, ed. Zürn, Nollkaemper, and Peerenboom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 111-12, 24.↩︎

153. Interview with (author), OSF, September 17, 2019.↩︎

154. Ian Martin, The New World Order: Opportunity or Threat for Human Rights? Edward Smith Visiting Lecture, Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, 1993. Gay MacDougall Papers, 1967-1999, Series III: Writings and Later Works, Box 250, Folder 5. Rare Books and Manuscripts Archive, Columbia University Library.↩︎

155. Cooley and Ron, "The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action."; Bush and Hadden, "Density and Decline in the Founding of International NGOs in the United States."↩︎

156. Neera Chandhoke, "Civil Society," Development in Practice, Vol. 17, No. 4-5 (2007); Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.↩︎