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This academic year Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs Emilie Hafner-Burton joined the Woodrow Wilson School's faculty from Oxford University, where she was Postdoctoral Research Prize Fellow, Nuffield College, and Senior Associate, Global Economic Governance Programme. She is also an Associated Fellow of the Stanford University Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

In December the Woodrow Wilson School's Office of External Affairs interviewed her about her research interests and teaching.

Woodrow Wilson School (WWS): Your research and teaching interests include international law, international organization and human rights. Where does the international community stand in terms of being able to prevent human rights abuses around the world?

Emilie Hafner-Burton (EHB): In order to answer that question in a meaningful way it is important to clarify what we mean by the international community. For example, there are international organizations, by which I mean governmental organizations -- such as the United Nations, NATO, the International Criminal Court and other human rights institutions. There are also a whole variety of regional mechanisms and treaties. When you consider what role these organizations play, the bottom line I believe is that they do a very bad job at preventing or ameliorating humans rights problems of most kinds.

What international organizations do a great job at is creating norms and principles to define what situations matter, which human rights are important, and why violations of those human rights are extremely problematic. What they really don't do a very good job of is actually changing behaviors of perpetrators; whether these are states or non-state actors that are violating these principles. In this respect, the international community of organizations is almost universally is failing in prevention and intervention.

Then we have international communities of non-state actors which include corporations but also non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activist groups. And there we see a very similar pattern, which is that NGOs are extremely important in forming norms and understandings of what is important in the area of human rights. They play an extremely important role by lobbying governments, consumers, corporations, and other organizations to care about human rights. They at times have an extraordinary effect on certain issues like banning land mines. In other areas like Darfur, and many of the human rights situations happening today, it's very hard to say they're making huge strides in bringing about reforms or stopping violence. The problems they seek to resolve are too deeply embedded in governmental policies and politics. Like international organizations, these members of the international community are better at building than implementing human rights norms.

An then you have states, which are an incredibly important feature of the international community, because quite frankly the United States, the Europeans, North Korea and Iran, these and other states like them are shaping world politics. They have an enormous impact on human rights; both because they're responsible for protecting or violating them and because they are taking unilateral actions domestically and abroad to solve -- or not -- human rights problems in various ways. Effective human rights reform requires meaningful change by governments, and often, significant intervention in another state's affairs.

WWS: The crisis in Darfur, in Sudan, seems to represent the challenges the international community broadly defined faces when trying to prevent or stop gross human rights violations. If the international community or an international organization like the U.N. won't or can't intervene in a situation like Darfur to prevent massive human rights abuses, should a state or coalition of like-minded states take action "outside the system," so to speak?

EHB: It's an incredibly hard question and it's obviously one that needs an answer. Ruling UN force out in a situation like Darfur is a bad idea, which is not to say that the irresponsible use of force can't make problems substantially worse -- because we've seen that they can. But ruling out force or intervention in my mind is the wrong way to think about this problem, and sends the wrong signal to the perpetrators of the violations. There is still time for the UN to take action. In fact, the UN Human Rights Council is debating this issue right now.

The question is, can the political will be mustered to make the use or threat of force credible or useful? It's a hard task, but it's not an impossible task. There are many people making arguments that market tools can be used to enforce compliance with human rights regimes and laws in places like the Sudan. I am a very strong proponent of using market tools to ameliorate human rights problems, but I think Sudan is not the best example of where market carrots and sticks are going to be useful.

The idea behind using market tools is that you want to provide incentives for perpetrators to reform, whether they're states, or in this case, militias and governments who are supporting militias. You want to provide the perpetrators with incentives that will make it more costly for them to perpetrate violations than to stop or change their behaviors in some meaningful way. And Sudan is a very hard case because it is not a country where we have strong trade ties. It's not a country with a lot of strategic value -- if I may put it that way -- for the countries that would yield market leverage over it. Imposing economic sanctions is not going to stop the human rights violations in Sudan because access to markets and aid is not what the janjaweed are after. Some initial use of force is necessary to end the massacres and secure rule of law. The U.N. is the most credible organization to lead this force. Once the immediate violence is contained, the process of domestic reforms can begin, and here NGOs, market incentives, and human rights organizations can all play a valuable role.

WWS: You also teach international political economy.

EHB: Yes. I teach two classes. One is an intro to international political economy for undergraduates and I also teach a graduate course.

WWS: So from that perspective, if NGOs, states, and international organizations are "naming and shaming" governments and other perpetrators of human rights abuses to create pressure, but this pressure ultimately doesn't work in stemming abuses, what are some of the specific market-based measures states can employ to get perpetrators to respect human rights?

EHB: My view is that employing market-based tools is one of the most fruitful ways to ameliorate human rights problems. Now, there is a caveat, which is very important, in that not every market-based measure will work and not for every human rights situation.

The way to think about this situation is to examine the incentive structures of the perpetrators of a given crisis. And when you're dealing with non-state perpetrators who have no incentives to garner trade or get aid from other governments or international organizations, because they are seeking to topple governments, you can actually make the situation worse by providing market-based incentives or threats that weaken governments.

To use market tools effectively requires being in tune to what the causes of the violence are. And not all causes of human rights abuses are easy to manipulate with markets or economic incentives, and not all states are easily manipulated, especially when they monopolize natural resources like oil or gas or are themselves a major world market. But the reality is that there are many situations in the world where there are extraordinary human rights violations happening, caused by governments or by sectors of industries or corporations who have deeply vested interests in market access to countries, or consumer demand for their products, and these actors can often be manipulated by market tools.

China might be a hard state to threaten with trade sanctions. However, the reality is that there are many states abusing human rights where market tools can make a difference. While they're never going to solve all human rights problems, they can at the very least provide a different incentive structure than international organizations to change the behavior of the perpetrators of some of these abuses.

I should mention that market tools range from the most extreme, which are complete economic sanctions, to "carrots" where you're providing aid or other preferential benefits bilaterally or multilaterally. There's a huge range of these tools out there even though we focus often times on the use of sanctions. There are many other ways to manipulate incentives using markets without having to resort to sanctions, which present problems because sanctions often times hurt the population more than they hurt the government. Corporate social responsibility movements are a great example of where this logic of harnessing markets to create incentives for perpetrators to reform can work, even if only in the margins. Consumer demand. Aid. Trade preferences. And other financial incentives. We have many tools at our disposal.

WWS: You've written that trade organizations don't always keep the peace. How so, and how can trade policy impact human rights or democratization efforts?

EHB: Yes, trade organizations don't always keep the peace. It's a tenet in the way we think about liberal philosophy in economics, but also in political science. We have this tendency to think about international organizations being inherently good things; they solve problems through cooperation, they allow states to come together who might otherwise have conflicts by providing a forum for interaction and communication. International organizations create all sorts of problem-solving mechanisms that allow states to get over their problems and to cooperate.

But it turns out there are a lot of exceptions to those types of rules and trade agreements are potentially one of them. There's an argument that's been made by two professors - one at U. Penn, Ed Mansfield, and one at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, John Pevehouse, that suggests that states belonging to preferential trading agreements (PTAs) tend not to go to war with their trade partners. And this follows a very long tradition in what we call the democratic peace literature, where democracies and trade dependent states don't fight each other.

But when you think about it there are very good reasons why these types of organizations at times can create animosity, rivalry and competition between their member states rather than solving problems. If you think about NAFTA or the European Union, there's not generally a lot of military conflict involved in those types of those PTAs. In Europe, trade relations were created for the express purpose of avoiding future wars. In Asia as well. The reality is that most PTAs in the world aren't formed by Western liberal democracies. The vast majority of them exist in Africa, in South America, in the Middle East, where you have collections of countries with much wider gaps in their beliefs systems and in their preferences and fundamentally in their interests and levels of economic wealth. And these institutions sometimes create forums for animosity and rivalry amongst these states. Not always, but sometimes. We can show statistically that there is a relationship between participating in these organizations and using sanctions or even military threats under some conditions.

Now how does that relate to your second question? There are a number of ways to think about trade and human rights. In my view the way these agreements work primarily has to do with coercion, it primarily has to do with small markets attaching themselves to big markets, where the big markets say, if you want access, basic issues like democratization and human rights protection are required. Think about Turkey or Romania or Bulgaria and their accession process to the EU, all these debates that are happening right now. Real progress in human rights has been made in these countries, motivated by access to the EU. Now, the EU is a special institution. But a similar process is happening in the United States as we negotiate trade deals. We require that our trade partners have minimal levels of protection for labor rights and children's rights in place domestically before we even consider passing a trade agreement. And this can also be an effective way of pushing stats to make human rights reforms that would not otherwise have been made, actually. Trade preferences, unilaterally or reciprocally, are powerful human rights tools.

There's another argument to be made, which is once a state joins these trade agreements, they will probably foster development some years down the road; that is, a middle class will form, and that middle class will in turn mobilize and pressure its own government for improved rights, and that's probably not wrong. But it's hard to see the trajectory of that.

And we also have evidence that there are some countries in the process of democratizing, particularly in Latin America, who have turned to these trade organizations to help as external mechanisms to "lock-in" democratic policy. And that's the same concept, which is to say these governments are looking to international organizations to punish them if they fail to do what they promise to do. In several cases in Latin America this strategy has been quite effective with respect to democratization. Not so much with respect to human rights. But with respect to democratization. But those two concepts are related.

WWS: In your view then, would a more decentralized approach to human rights be more effective than a top-down approach emanating from the U.N.?

EHB: I think that you need both. While there is some inherent tension in the system, comprised of actors and institutions at the global, regional, and unilateral or bilateral levels, I think all are necessary when it comes to implementation. It's extremely important to have these issues embedded in the United Nations because you need global legitimacy for human rights, which isn't to say that the U.N. is the only perspective on what types of human rights matter, but this in my view is the U.N.'s primary strength. It is informing global understandings and principles about which rights matter and must be universally and fundamentally respected no matter what part of the world you live in, no matter what type of government you have, no matter what language you speak. We need the United Nations for that role.

The issue becomes that in the world in which we live and the power politics that dominate it, the U.N. in my view will never be successful at implementation of most of these principles. There are no feasible reforms we can make that will make this organization successful on this front globally. Of course in certain circumstances, potentially in the Sudan for example, the U.N. can make a clear difference. Action by the Security Council can make a difference. But we need alternative solutions to the UN.

These solutions can be regional, they can be unilateral or bilateral, and they will probably remain ad hoc for the foreseeable future because power politics and geopolitics prevent the formation of more authoritative world body capable of implementing human rights norms. So it's not a matter of one or the other -- those two approaches must go hand-in-hand. We need all of these actors on the stage. Otherwise you lose legitimacy for any actions taken primarily by or on behalf of Western governments towards perpetrators of abuse. The UN must create and legitimate the norms. Liberal governments, and coalitions of governments, must use foreign policy tools to implement them.

WWS: The U.N.'s Commission on Human Rights was very controversial for a number of reasons, and it's been replaced by the Human Rights Council (HRC). Can a U.N. body created for monitoring human rights and punishing violators operate effectively, and importantly with a sufficient level of credibility?

EHB: Well, the answer is yes in theory, but I don't think it's politically feasible. The HRC replaced the Commission, which was totally dysfunctional for a whole variety of reasons, but in part because some of the world's worst human rights violators sat on the Commission.

In the new U.N. Council, a number of reforms have been made. Countries must all report on their actions. This is a new development. And a country can now be voted off of the HRC if its human rights behavior is unacceptable to an absolute majority of the General Assembly. But we still see countries like Cuba, Russia and Pakistan sitting on the Council so one wonders who would possibly be excluded by these rules. Iran and Zimbabwe. OK. But the Council is right now made up of many states either perpetrating or allowing human rights violations. Until you have an institution that does not allow perpetrators to make decisions about implementation, you will not do much to solve the world's human rights problems, because they will never vote to condemn their own governments or take actions in any meaningful way.

But I think it is possible to create another type of organization which would fundamentally have to be a coalition of democracies. I don't mean Western democracies, but I do mean liberal democracies that abide by and choose to protect human rights at the very foundational level - and this of course is related to the Princeton Project on National Security final report, which was just released this fall. PPNS makes a similar argument with the "concert of democracies" concept. But in short my hope for the United Nations' Human Rights Council is not strong. The major chance for reform has been lost this year.

WWS: Are there other research areas or aspects of this issue on which you're focusing?

EHB: My main research focus at present is the human rights project. At its essence is the belief that most of the international institutions out there aren't functioning very well when it comes to enforcement and so we need to look for alternative solutions or complementary solutions for implementation. The market is one way to do that. I have different book projects going to address that. The first book project looks at preferential trade agreements that adopt human rights and labor standards, and it's a historical explanation of the evolution of the trade policy in the United States and in the European Union with third party countries. It explains why trade and human rights have come to be linked in our regional trade agreements, because they haven't been put into place for the reasons that you would think, which is that global norms are cascading and human rights are simply the right thing to do. These are not the reasons why these rules are in place. It happens that these rules are sometimes making a difference in human rights policy, but they're there for entirely different reasons that have to do with domestic political squabbles between different people, parties, and institutions in the United States and the European Union. The book should be complete by this coming summer.

The second book that I'll be getting into in the next few years looks at international human rights law and makes the broader argument that these laws turn out to be utter failures in terms of actually pushing forward compliance behavior; it also looks at the role of media, at the role of non-governmental organizations, and further examines various market tools to determine which under which circumstances, which types of conflicts, in which regions of the world these different tools matter. How do they function together? The idea is to forge a better understanding of what tools we have available to us, and when these tools are functional, because they don't all work in the same circumstances.