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"Lost" Causes , livre ebook

Cornell University Press - Charli Carpenter

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Why do some issues and threats-diseases, weapons, human rights abuses, vulnerable populations-get more global policy attention than others? How do global activist networks decide the particular causes for which they advocate among the many problems in need of solutions? According to Charli Carpenter, the answer lies in the politics of global issue networks themselves. Building on surveys, focus groups, and analyses of issue network websites, Carpenter concludes that network access has a direct relation to influence over how issues are ranked. Advocacy elites in nongovernmental and transnational organizations judge candidate issues not just on their merit but on how the issues connect to specific organizations, individuals, and even other issues. In "Lost" Causes, Carpenter uses three case studies of emerging campaigns to show these dynamics at work: banning infant male circumcision; compensating the wartime killing and maiming of civilians; and prohibiting the deployment of fully autonomous weapons (so-called killer robots). The fate of each of these campaigns was determined not just by the persistence and hard work of entrepreneurs but by advocacy elites' perception of the issues' network ties. Combining sweeping analytical argument with compelling narrative, Carpenter reveals how the global human security agenda is determined.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Sociology

International relations

Activism

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Publié par	Cornell University Press
Date de parution	24 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780801470363
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,7500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

“Lost” Causes

Agenda Vetting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security

Charli Carpenter

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which helped in the publication of this book.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2014 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2014 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Carpenter, R. Charli, author. Lost causes : agenda vetting in global issue networks and the shaping of human security / Charli Carpenter. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780801448850 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9780801476044 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Human rights advocacy. 2. Globalization and human rights. 3. Human rights movements. I. Title. JC571.C319 2014 361.2'6—dc23 2013050932

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, lowVOC inks and acidfree papers that are recycled, totally chlorinefree, or partly composed of nonwood ﬁbers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing Paperback printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface List of Acronyms

Contents

1. Agenda Vetting and Agenda Setting in Global Governance

2. Networks, Centrality, and Global Issue Creation

3. A Network Theory of Advocacy “Gatekeeper” Decision Making

4. “You Harm, You Help”: Pitching Collateral Damage Control to Human Security Gatekeepers

5. From “Stop the Robot Wars!” to “Ban Killer Robots”: Pitching “Autonomous Weapons” to Humanitarian Disarmament Elites

6. “His Body, His Choice”: Pitching Infant Male Circumcision to Health and Human Rights Gatekeepers Conclusion

Appendix

vii xv

1 19 38

122 148

155

v i C o n t e n t s

Notes References Index

Platesat end of eBook

179 207 221

Preface

In early December 2006, as part of my work on the human rights of children born of war rape, I sat in a meeting in Cologne, Germany, where human rights activists from several countries discussed strategies for addressing the social problems faced after armed conﬂicts by children 1 fathered by foreign soldiers. The meeting had been organized by social scientists at the University of Cologne and a Norwegian nongovernmental organization (NGO) concerned with adult “war children.” The event drew together researchers from eastern Europe, the United States, and Africa to “consolidate the evidence base” on “children born of war” and develop a strategy for policy changes to address the needs of this population. Present also at the meeting was a representative from the United Na tions Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and much discussion centered on whether the United Nations, and UNICEF in particular, should pay at tention to the “war child” population. Over the course of the two days, the UNICEF representative consistently argued against this idea, stressing a variety of organizational, conceptual, and logistical issues. Toward the

v i i i P r e f a c e

end of the conference, despite case data, statistical evidence, and eloquent rightsbased arguments by several of the activists at the conference, the UNICEF representative stated, “I remain to be convinced of the merit of 2 UNICEF treating these children as a speciﬁc group.” What struck me about this interaction was the power dynamic between an elite bureaucrat from a highly inﬂuential node in the child rights network— UNICEF—and the less powerful, less wellconnected entrepreneurs championing the cause of an overlooked group. I dwelt on this at some length in a chapter of my subsequent book,Forgetting Children Born of War.That book did not focus on advocacy networks speciﬁcally but rather on the entire set of institutions involved in constructing narratives of women and children in postwar Bosnia. Still, the question of how issues come to the attention of global advocacy organizations—and the signiﬁcance ofcer tainorganizations in promoting or blocking such emergent ideas—caught my attention, given a general optimism at the time about the power of “transnational advocacy networks” in global normbuilding. If advocacy networks were such an obvious force for good and a natural vehicle for individuals to mobilize pressure for social change from recalcitrant states, then how could we explain why so many causes got overlooked, even when norm entrepreneurs went to great lengths to format and present new ideas to these very networks? Actually, why certain issues, ideas, and vulnerable groups fall through the cracks in global issue networks had fascinated me since early in my academic career, and I had long sensed that this was not a dynamic lim ited to the human rights network. In my dissertation on humanitarian af fairs, I had documented how the gendered structure of both international norms and advocacy discourse produced a general inattention to the vul 3 nerability of civilian men in conﬂict zones. In my master’slevel work on sovereignty and international space policy, I noticed how issues straddling seemingly disconnected policy arenas—such as environmentally friendly efforts to achieve interstellar travel—failed to achieve resonance or policy signiﬁcance. In thinking about these broader issues around 2007, I found little schol arly attention to the dynamics of issue neglect in international relations scholarship, and I found my own work on the subject matter limited by a smallN problem: like so much scholarship on successful advocacy campaigns, my research on issue neglect tended to draw on data from only one issue at a time. I could offer a detailed explanation of how

P r e f a c e i x

one speciﬁc group fell off the global advocacy radar, but to what extent could I assume the factors that mattered in that case could explain other cases or could be generalized to other issue areas? I wanted to study this in a more rigorous way. In 2007, several col leagues and I applied for and received an award from the National Sci ence Foundation (NSF), which enabled us to develop models for studying global issue emergence empirically (any opinions, ﬁndings, and con clusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author[s] and do not necessarily reﬂect the views of the NSF). The ﬁrst year was spent developing, testing, and reﬁning a methodology for track ing advocacy networks and issues online, and for identifying and exploring the nonemergence of neglected issues. The project enabled us to employ and train thirtyseven students, build and launch a sophisticated website, advance conceptual understandings of what is on the human security issue agenda and what is not, and build a theory explaining this variation by integrating domestic agendasetting models into the study of transna tional politics. For data on the issue agenda we drew on surveys and web content; for data on the preferences of human security elites, we drew on focus groups with human security practitioners; and for an understanding of how this process panned out over time on existing issues, I tracked the work of three emerging campaigns in three different issue areas: humani tarian affairs, security, and human rights. The picture that emerges is profound: lots of issues get overlooked in international politics, and the survival or salience of issues is not deter mined by the merit of the issues themselves or the receptivity of the ex ternal environment. Rather,relationships within the networkmake all the difference—relationships between issues, between actors, between indi viduals, and between subnetworks themselves. The density of network ties, the nature of network ties, and individuals’ judgments about the af ﬁliations of others all inﬂuence perceptions about the credibility of mes sengers and the value of ideas in global networks. In this book, I show how and why this is the case. Since my key method for understanding global networks was to talk to people located within them, this book would not have been pos sible without the willing engagement of practitioners. Numerous indi viduals embedded in and around the human security network allowed me to enter their spaces as an observer (and sometimes participant), and invested valuable time joining me in conversational settings of my own