The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time of major change in the practice of international interference. Prior to this time, leaders throughout the Global South had opposed any interference in their domestic affairs – even public comments from other governments – as an unacceptable violation of their sovereignty.Footnote ¹ However, in these years, leaders in Latin America and Africa began to empower their regional organizations, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Organization of African Unity (OAU), to enforce human rights in ways that involved interference and to speak of this regional enforcement as legitimate. Since then, regional organizations have become central to human rights enforcement, international intervention, and global governance.

What explains this change, and why did it not happen in other regions, namely the Middle East and Southeast Asia? I argue that the decision to accept international interference was part of a strategy by leaders in Latin America and Africa to establish their regional organizations as authorities over human rights, accepting interference within their regional organizations and asserting the authority of regional enforcement vis-à-vis other enforcers. They adopted this strategy in response to new forms of pressure that challenged their states’ self-determination. These pressures did not arise in the Middle East or Southeast Asia, and as a result, leaders in those regions continued to reject all interference.

For leaders in Latin America and Africa, insisting on non-interference and asserting regional authority over human rights were two different strategies for accomplishing the same goal of limiting the external imposition of rules and safeguarding self-determination. One strategy created a hard shell around the state, while the other created mechanisms for filtering and managing outside involvement and amplifying the region’s influence over interference. Once the first strategy no longer worked, they switched to the second.

The decision to accept regional human rights enforcement was a significant change in state practice toward sovereignty and the norm of non-interference, as well as an important moment in the emergence of regional organizations as central to legitimate intervention. In Latin America, the “doctrine of non-intervention” had developed in response to European intervention in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was adapted to the threat posed by the United States and “Yankee imperialism.” In Africa, the emphasis placed on non-interference and territorial integrity in the post-independence years led to accusations that the region was a “club of dictators.” In Southeast Asia, non-interference became a cornerstone of the “ASEAN way,” the set of norms and practices governing state behavior within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In the Middle East, states demanded respect for non-interference by external powers, while a regional order governed by strict respect for one another’s sovereignty within the region was consolidated between 1967 and 1973.

Because of historically high levels of material weakness and economic dependence, leaders throughout the Global South have benefitted from norms and rules that prioritize legal equality over material power in inter-state relations.Footnote ² Following formal decolonization, many saw their newly won sovereignty as undermined by great power meddling, political pressure, and foreign control of their economy. In response, these leaders argued for and institutionalized increasingly strict and expansive rules about sovereignty and non-interference. In other words, decolonization transformed rather than ending the struggle for self-determination.

Across these regions, state and non-state actors also placed great value on sovereignty as the realization of the collective right to self-determination, while non-interference was understood as a corollary to this right and a means for realizing it against imperialism and neo-colonialism. Regional organizations respected non-interference, and they were also important tools for institutionalizing this norm and policing violations. Even where human rights institutions were set up within regional organizations, they were given no authority to interfere in member states’ domestic affairs, and member states mostly ignored them.

However, in the 1970s, the paths of these regions diverged. In Latin America and Africa, leaders began to give up their strict opposition to interference, developing or dramatically expanding institutions for the enforcement of human rights within their regional organizations. At the same time, they called for others to defer to regional efforts to enforce human rights. In Latin America, leaders began to ratify the long-dormant American Convention on Human Rights en masse, consent to visits from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and collectively challenge governments’ human rights violations during meetings of the Organization of American States. They gave new authority to the Inter-American Commission, increased its budget, and allowed it to carry out its tasks. They also accepted the authority of the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. These institutions had been ignored or actively undermined since they were created, when leaders suddenly began to accept their authority and facilitate and augment their work. The Inter-American human rights system has since been regarded as one of the most effective in the world.Footnote ³

In Africa, leaders passed a resolution calling for the creation of a regional human rights charter and a commission to enforce the charter in 1979, and they adopted the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 1981. The charter established the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, an independent commission of human rights experts empowered to “resort to any appropriate method of investigation” to address human rights violations, including receiving and acting on accusations made by individuals and NGOs.Footnote ⁴ The charter came into effect in 1986. Since that time, regional and subregional human rights institutions have proliferated. A human rights court was set up in 1998, and in 2000, the OAU was transformed into the African Union and given unprecedented authority to intervene militarily in member states in response to war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.Footnote ⁵ The African human rights system is generally considered to be less effective than Latin America’s, with the latter benefitting from greater democratization in the 1980s. Nevertheless, African human rights institutions were designed with real power and autonomy, and their creation represented a real and significant shift away from the norm of non-interference.

By contrast, leaders in the Middle East and Southeast Asia continued to reject any interference and refrained from creating institutions that permitted even minimal interference long after these changes took place in Latin America and Africa. What regional human rights institutions have been created came about much later, have weaker powers, and are subject to greater state control.

In the Middle East, the members of the League of Arab States set up a human rights commission in 1968. However, the commission was made up of government representatives rather than independent experts, and its powers were distinctly respectful of sovereignty. Its mandate included facilitating dialogue, raising awareness, and coordinating member states’ external human rights advocacy. In practice, it focused almost exclusively on advocating for the rights of Palestinians.Footnote ⁶ A string of proposals for expanding the organization’s human rights mandate and institutions in the 1970s and 1980s went nowhere, and it was only in 2004 that a human rights charter, establishing a new human rights commission, finally received enough ratifications to come into existence. Even then, the new commission remains limited in important ways. It cannot receive information about human rights violations from individuals within member states, considered a crucial piece of a human rights enforcement system. A human rights court, created in 2014, can only receive complaints from states and state-approved NGOs.Footnote ⁷ Saudi Arabia is the only state to have ratified the court’s statute.

Southeast Asian leaders made their first steps toward creating human rights institutions within ASEAN in 2009, establishing the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. Like the Arab League’s commission, the ASEAN commission has no formal authority to investigate or challenge member states or to even consider their domestic human rights records. It is also, as its name suggests, a commission composed of government representatives rather than independent human rights experts.Footnote ⁸ The ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, adopted in 2012, is a statement of voluntary standards, not a set of legally binding obligations.

The consequences of this regional divergence have persisted and now extend beyond human rights. Regional and subregional organizations in Latin America and Africa have developed a wide range of institutions for democracy promotion and election monitoring, counterterrorism, civil conflict resolution, and anti-corruption. They have authority to monitor, criticize, sanction, and suspend member states. By contrast, while regional organizations in Southeast Asia and the Middle East have expanded into new issue areas, cooperation in sensitive political issues has remained much more limited and less institutionalized. Institutions that have been set up tend to be respectful of sovereignty, operating to a much greater degree under the control of the governments whose policies and behaviors they’re meant to challenge.

What explains the sudden shift in approach to interference in Latin America and Africa, and why did leaders gravitate toward institutionalizing human rights within their own regional organizations? Why did this change occur only in some regions, while others held firm on the norm of non-interference for much longer and to a much greater degree? Each of these regions had developed similar practices and beliefs with respect to non-interference, and each derived significant strategic benefits from this norm. All valued sovereignty as the realization of the right to self-determination and saw non-interference as a means to realize this right in the face of pressures from more powerful states. Yet, out of these four regions, it was only in Latin America and Africa where the 1970s marked the beginning of a major transformation in how leaders approached state sovereignty, a transformation which spread to many other sensitive areas of these states’ domestic politics.

In this book, I argue that this divergence was the result of diverging strategies for using institutions to resist the imposition of enforcement in the face of different pressures experienced by these regions. It represented a transformation of the political struggle for self-determination. As articulated by Edem Kodjo, Secretary General of the OAU and one of the architects of the African human rights system, its creation was motivated by “the twin objectives of liberation vis-à-vis the rest of the world and the internal democratization of African societies.”Footnote ⁹ This project, and the goal of self-determination, united democratic leaders, human rights advocates, and dictators whose governments were engaged in serious violations of human rights.

In the mid-1970s, Western governments began to enforce human rights by incorporating human rights considerations into their economic relations with developing states. Western governments leveraged developing states’ weakness and their economic dependence on the West to push acceptance of and compliance with human rights standards. Human rights had occasionally entered into their decision-making about trade and development assistance before this, but it was only in the 1970s that these policies became common and widespread.

These policies were seen throughout the Global South as neo-colonial and imperialistic; they clashed with widely held views about the principle of self-determination. However, simply objecting to the policies, including with appeals to sovereignty and the norm of non-interference, was ineffective. The citizens of Western states and prominent civil society groups had started to accept and even demand interference in response to serious human rights violations, while leaders like US President Jimmy Carter had themselves started to think of interfering in support of human rights as both legitimate and permissible under international law.

In Latin America and Africa, these interventionist policies became the new status quo, substantially altering leaders’ decision-making over whether to accept interference. Interventionist enforcement was going to happen one way or another, and the question now was who would interfere and how. It was at this point that leaders in these two regions began to establish their regional organizations as authorities over human rights. This change happened unevenly by region because the pressures were uneven. Western governments targeted Africa and Latin America, where doing so was relatively cheap and easy and did not jeopardize other important foreign policy goals, while largely subsuming human rights to other political and economic goals in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

This strategy combined and appealed to widely held beliefs about the legitimacy of international institutions and local self-rule, and it leveraged concerns in the West about legitimate relations with weaker, post-colonial states. Because of this, where regional institutions met certain expectations about what enforcement ought to look like, Western leaders were willing to accept the authority of regional organizations and defer to their enforcement. The most important expectation was that regional institutions must be empowered to interfere in their members’ domestic affairs.

I focus here on attempts to establish regional authority over human rights, but I argue that this strategy has been used much more widely. Developing and advocating for the idea of regions as authorities has been an important way for different political actors in the Global South, both within and outside of government, to increase capacity and space for self-rule. It has helped them resist the many pressures they face from more powerful actors, manage outside involvement in their region, and increase their own influence over global decision-making.

Establishing regional authority over human rights was an important example of this strategy. It was also an important moment of transformation away from this strategy being used to support state sovereignty and toward accepting interference as long as it was supported by or carried out through regional organizations. In fact, this reshaping of international authority has been especially pronounced in the area of human rights. Regional organizations are central to the international enforcement regime, with the relatively weak global regime standing in contrast to regional systems, whose human rights courts “have no global parallel.”Footnote ¹⁰ The most substantial form of enforcement – judicialization – exists exclusively within regional organizations.Footnote ¹¹ Prominent advocates of human rights like the European Parliament and the International Commission of Jurists have characterized regional organizations as “fundamental” to the global human rights regime,Footnote ¹² “constitut[ing] the main pillars of the international system for the promotion and protection of human rights.”Footnote ¹³

This is despite the fact that, in many ways, human rights are poorly suited to a regional approach and clash with the idea of regional authority, as universality represents a core, defining feature of human rights. A UN study group, convened in 1968 to discuss the idea of regional human rights commissions, voiced concern that human rights were a “universal problem,”Footnote ¹⁴ and “United Nations activities alone could ensure a uniform application of accepted norms.”Footnote ¹⁵ In a volume released in 1982, Karel Vasak, a major figure in human rights known for developing the idea of “three generations” of rights, observed that, in the 1960s, regional approaches to human rights had been regarded with suspicion, seeming to represent a “breakaway movement” that challenged universality.Footnote ¹⁶

Regional authority is not a natural or obvious feature of the international system, and the many downsides, weaknesses, and failures of regional organizations in the Global South are well-documented. Regions are home to significant rivalries and conflict; engage in biased decision-making; contain substantial linguistic, cultural, and political heterogeneity; and lack resources and political will for effectively dealing with regional issues.Footnote ¹⁷ Instead, regional authority has been strategically constructed by actors that benefit from their regional organizations having a stronger voice and greater representation in global politics as it affects their region.

The argument presented here speaks to larger questions about the current world order and, in particular, how regional organizations came to be taken for granted as legitimate and effective sites for policymaking and global governance. It helps explain how appeals to the norm of regional solutions to regional problems, which recognizes a right for regions to address matters internal to themselves and promotes the idea that they are uniquely well-suited to do so, came to take on an almost ritualistic quality in global governance.

Appeals to this norm are part of the rhetoric of great powers, who use it to frame and justify their foreign policies. US representatives have extolled the importance of “African-led security efforts” in combatting terrorism, noting that “African leadership for African problems can lead to solutions.”Footnote ¹⁸ Xi Jinping has promoted the idea of “Asia for Asians” as the Chinese government works to limit US influence in the region.Footnote ¹⁹ United Nations Security Council resolutions and debates routinely acknowledge the important role of “relevant” regional organizations. The UN Secretary General holds annual coordinating meetings with representatives of regional organizations, and in a 2022 address, Secretary General António Guterres characterized cooperation between regional organizations and the UN as “essential.”Footnote ²⁰

This idea of regional authority has reconfigured the logic of collective legitimation, with regional organizations becoming an important source of legitimation for global action.Footnote ²¹ In establishing regional organizations as both legitimate authorities and legitimizers of global action, leaders using this strategy have increased space for self-determined action in the context of a constraining and hierarchical international system.

1.1 Overview of the Argument: Self-Determination Through Regional Authority

In this book, I argue that leaders in Africa and Latin America created, accepted, and expanded regional human rights enforcement institutions as part of a strategy to establish their regional organizations as authorities over human rights. By creating alternative enforcement institutions and arguing that others ought to respect and defer to these institutions, they were quietly pushing back against the imposition of human rights enforcement by Western governments. Leaders in these two regions became willing to relax their absolute rejection of international interference in pursuit of the larger, overarching goal of self-determination. Leaders in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, by contrast, retained their strict stance toward non-interference for much longer and to a much greater degree because they did not encounter these same forms of imposed enforcement.

In developing this argument, I conceptualize self-determination to include self-determination over international rules. It is this conception of self-determination that I draw from to talk about the imposition of human rights enforcement. This form of imposition is distinct from “cultural imperialism,” or the imposition of Western values onto non-Western peoples and societies, a common criticism of human rights. Imposition as I discuss it in this book is not about the content of rules or even the existence of a historical relationship of colonial or imperial domination, though these dynamics may also be present.Footnote ²² Instead, it is about how states, and the people within them, are bound by rules and how those rules are enforced. In fact, many leaders and activists in Global South viewed guarding individuals’ human rights from abuse by their state as important, and they were actively involved in promoting human rights in some contexts, including in institutions they shared with former colonizers. They did so at the same time as they rejected the exploitation of economic dependence as a means of enforcement.

I build on theorizing on self-determination from the fields of psychology, philosophy, and feminist and indigenous theory, which share a perspective on self-determination as consistent with and potentially realized through cooperation, interdependence, and the surrendering or pooling of sovereign decision-making authority.Footnote ²³ This understanding forms an important part of how state and non-state actors throughout the Global South have long advocated for self-determination as a necessary basis for legitimate relations between states and the legitimate exercise of power in the international system.

What would it mean for international rules to be self-determined? How is self-determination realized in a system of sovereign states? The international side of self-determination has often been treated, both in scholarship and in practice, as synonymous with, or most fully realized through, sovereign independence and strict non-interference – in other words, with the complete exclusion of outside actors and rules.Footnote ²⁴ As I discuss in Chapter 2, expanding and policing rules of non-interference, including within regional organizations, was one important strategy for realizing self-determination. It accomplished this goal by restricting forms of interference or pressure that would undermine self-determined action.

However, for anti- and post-colonial leaders, activists, and scholars, self-determination was not achieved by sovereign statehood alone nor, conversely, did its full realization require the total exclusion of external rules or authority.Footnote ²⁵ Significant forms of cooperation, delegation, and outside interference could be consistent with, and even expressions of, self-determination. For example, some anti-colonial leaders in French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean advocated for self-determination in the form of equal integration in a reconstituted, democratic French federation. Anti- and post-colonial leaders also commonly sought self-determination through the pooling of sovereignty into regional federations.Footnote ²⁶

Rather than strict sovereignty, independence, or autarky, self-determination was about the nature of international cooperation and interdependence. Realizing the principle of self-determination in the international system meant ensuring that international institutions and inter-state relations met certain standards for the legitimate exercise of power. Specifically, it required states, and by extension the people within them, to be able to domestically affirm international rules, meaning the decision to accept rules and their enforcement would be the product of domestic decision-making processes, and to meaningfully participate in the enforcement of rules, or to take part in and influence the design and enforcement of rules to which they were subject.Footnote ²⁷ In other words, international interference, monitoring, and policymaking can be consistent with self-determination if they are domestically affirmed by the people of a state and if those people retain, through their government, the ability to equitably participate in the implementation, elaboration, and enforcement of international rules. This, of course, necessitated the democratic representativeness of governments, who provide a crucial link between people within states and the international system. As I discuss in the following pages and in Chapter 2, many leaders and activists championed democracy within states alongside reforms to democratize the international system.

The goal, then, was not to be free from any international authority or to eliminate interdependence. Instead, recognizing the reality of their dependence and the necessity of cooperation, the goal was to reshape inter-state relations and to change the nature of their interdependence. Guyanese historian and prominent anti-imperial activist Walter Rodney offered a typical articulation of this perspective in his influential 1972 book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, contrasting imperialistic economic dependence on Western metropoles with “mutual interdependence” that preserved the “capacity to exercise choice.”Footnote ²⁸

International institutions were one of the main tools used by leaders and activists in the Global South to ensure that international relations met these standards. Institutions were an important part of translating abstract ideas about self-determination, authority, hierarchy, and dependence into real decision-making rules and standards for behaviors. Putting these ideas into practice involved creating or reforming international organizations, designing treaties, and elaborating on existing legal principles with the goal of placing decision-making on an equal playing field and eliminating the many forms of international domination that persisted after independence.Footnote ²⁹

It was this understanding of self-determination, and new challenges to it that arose in the 1970s, that motivated leaders in Latin America and Africa to regionalize human rights enforcement. At this time, governments of Western states faced pressure from their citizens and from global civil society, who had become suddenly, intensely interested in human rights violations around the world and demanded that their governments take action to defend human rights and to stop supporting violent, abusive leaders. Western governments responded by tying access to economic cooperation to developing states’ domestic human rights records and increasingly weighing their relations with developing states against international and domestic demands – and their own growing desire – to privilege human rights in their foreign policies. The United States under the presidency of Jimmy Carter was perhaps the most prominent and consequential government that adopted these policies, but during this time, they were also adopted by a number of European governments, notably the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries, and they were introduced into the external policy of the European Economic Community in the second half of the 1970s.Footnote ³⁰

Initially, this enforcement took the form of ad hoc, targeted responses to the most extreme cases of human rights violations, like those in Chile under Augusto Pinochet and Uganda under Idi Amin. However, Western governments soon expanded and institutionalized these enforcement policies by introducing human rights into their relations with a wider set of developing states, rather than just those governments responsible for gross violations of human rights. They also shifted from applying sanctions in response to only the most serious violations to adopting a system of pressure and inducements aimed at increasing the overall observance of human rights around the world. Much of the Global South could now expect that human rights would factor into their economic relations with the West, through both formal policies and informal, behind-the-scenes decision-making.

These enforcement measures created new policies to which states were now subject, but to which they did not consent, and which were designed and implemented in contexts where they were unable to exercise influence. This was, in fact, largely the point of human rights conditionality.Footnote ³¹ Latin American and African leaders that encountered these policies objected to them, including by appealing to the norm of non-interference. However, their objections were made ineffective by the new beliefs that had taken hold about the legitimacy of interfering to protect human rights.

This changed the decision-making calculus of leaders encountering this new pressure. It was no longer a question of whether human rights would be enforced in ways that involved interference, but who would enforce them and how. Under these new circumstances, leaders preferred to have human rights enforced in institutions where decision-making rules gave them a say in human rights priorities and enforcement and where they would not be held up for one-sided judgement.Footnote ³²

It was in response to this pressure that leaders moved to establish regional authority over human rights. Doing so involved two non-sequential steps. First, leaders accepted regional authority, meaning that they created, accepted, and expanded regional human rights institutions and cooperated within their regional organizations to act on human rights violations. Second, they asserted to actors outside of the region – including Western states, international NGOs, and bureaucrats of global international organizations – that regional organizations should be regarded as authorities over human rights within their regions, and they should be given a voice over human rights enforcement being carried out within their geographic domain.Footnote ³³ This required developing the idea that regional organizations were an appropriate place for human rights to be enforced, something that was not taken for granted at this time. In many cases, they argued that regional organizations were the more appropriate authority for addressing human rights violations and that actors outside of the region should defer to them.

These two steps were linked. The goal was to persuade Western governments, and the citizens and civil society actors demanding these governments respond to human rights violations, that they should accept regional organizations as authorities over human rights. To accomplish this, regional institutions had to be designed in ways that would meet these different actors’ expectations of what constituted acceptable enforcement, and leaders had to actually accept and cooperate with them. This meant, most importantly, that regional institutions needed to be empowered to interfere in states’ domestic affairs, including by investigating domestic human rights violations, commenting on domestic practices and policies, and recommending or ordering changes.

Leaders within targeted regions that genuinely supported human rights and dictators that were abusing human rights had similar beliefs and overlapping motivations that led them to adopt this strategy. This included the desire to push back against the imposition of enforcement and to ensure equal influence and voice over enforcement to which they were subject. Even those leaders that genuinely supported human rights nevertheless had principled objections to the use of economic enforcement, and they became important agents in advocating for regional institutions with real power and independence. For authoritarians and leaders abusing human rights, self-determination was a matter of both principle and strategy, as these pressures threatened their regimes and were regarded as illegitimate domination and imperialist interference. Their indignation pushed them toward regional enforcement and made them open to accepting more challenging authority than they otherwise would have if their goal was regime survival alone.

This strategy was effective because it appealed to the beliefs of Western governments and their domestic publics about the normative value of self-rule and the legitimacy of acting within international institutions. This thinking was articulated in a 1978 internal policy document prepared by Jimmy Carter’s Director of Policy Planning, Anthony Lake. Under a section titled “The Perception of Arrogance,” Lake suggested that “We should now be consulting with others – at the UN, in the OAS, and with other regional leaders (e.g., in black Africa) – about their suggestions for effective human rights strategies in their areas, in the context of their own cultural, economic, and political situations.”Footnote ³⁴ Where leaders in Africa and Latin America were willing to enforce human rights, and where regional enforcement met Western leaders’ expectations of what constituted legitimate and effective enforcement, Western leaders were willing to accept the authority of regions.

As I discuss in Chapter 4, the first steps toward establishing regional authority over human rights were taken by Augusto Pinochet’s government in Chile in 1975, which became the first and most intense subject of these new enforcement policies. The Chilean government argued that actors from outside of the region should accept the OAS as the appropriate authority to deal with human rights within Latin America. They did so, however, as a regime survival strategy, accepting regional enforcement in ways that attempted to manipulate and undermine the regional system, paper over their abuses, and placate critics. The Chilean government’s attempts to manipulate the regional system to deflect pressure were transparent and failed, but their actions carved out a new path for responding to this newly emerging human rights pressure.

This strategy was quickly transformed from mere manipulation of regional institutions into more genuine acceptance of regional authority once the rest of Latin America became involved in 1976, and again after Jimmy Carter’s administration widened the US’s economic enforcement policies to cover the entire region in 1977. Latin American leaders that supported human rights enforcement believed in the regional system. They also objected to both US-dominated enforcement and the use of economic conditions as counter to the principle of self-determination. In response to the US government’s policies, leaders throughout the region, including authoritarian governments, began to accept genuinely challenging authority within the OAS and to assert regional authority over human rights. Once African governments began to confront these pressures several years later following international attention on Idi Amin’s government in Uganda, they adopted this same strategy, creating a regional human rights system from scratch.

Regional variation in whether this change occurred is explained by whether or not regions were targeted by economic enforcement policies. Past research has established that human rights are often subsumed to other strategic concerns in Western foreign policy.Footnote ³⁵ Though Western governments were responding to pressure from domestic constituents and international civil society, they retained considerable discretion over their global human rights policies, and they tended to apply human rights pressure where it was relatively cheap, meaning there were few tradeoffs or chances of it damaging other important priorities, and easy, where pre-existing relationships and institutions were available into which human rights could be introduced and where greater leverage meant that the likelihood of success was high.

However, rather than making decisions on a state-by-state basis, Western governments devised their human rights policies with entire regions in mind. This resulted in what the US State Department Director of Policy Planning referred to in 1978 as “regional discrimination.”Footnote ³⁶ The United States and Western Europe had similar constraints in designing their foreign policies, including massive increases in oil prices, Cold War politics, and a global recession; similar opportunities, in terms of the regions in which they had substantial leverage;Footnote ³⁷ and similar foreign policy goals, including establishing peace in the Middle East, maintaining access to oil, and expanding into new export markets. They independently developed patterns of enforcement that emphasized human rights in Latin America and Africa, while consistently overlooking or down-playing violations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Where Western countries did apply pressure on human rights in the latter two regions, it tended to be much more limited and symbolic.

This regional discrimination meant that Latin America and Africa faced new and unprecedented pressure on an issue that had previously been treated as purely a matter of domestic politics. In response, Latin American and African leaders adopted the strategy of establishing regional authority over human rights. By contrast, in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, human rights remained subsumed to other economic and security concerns in the foreign policies of important donors and trade partners in the West, and leaders in these regions continued to treat human rights as a domestic matter not subject to interference.

The argument presented in this book is an elite story, with leaders throughout the Global South motivated by, wielding, and acting on the basis of shared understandings of the principle of self-determination. It was leaders that made decisions about how to engage with the norm of non-interference and pushed to establish regional authority over human rights. Many benefitted from an understanding of self-determination that increased their own space for autonomous decision-making and delegitimized international pressure that challenged them personally.

However, this was not just an authoritarian strategy of regime survival. In important ways and at crucial moments, it was led by democratic leaders and human rights advocates, who saw the realization of self-determination, democracy, and human rights within states as linked to and of equal importance as their realization in the international system. These democratic leaders and human rights advocates played an important role in pushing for regional institutions to be designed with real power. Additionally, as I elaborate on in later chapters, this understanding of self-determination drew from shared beliefs about self-rule that were also held by non-state actors within these regions. Leaders throughout the Global South were shaped by these ideas and drew from them in their utilization of regional organizations.

This shared ideational basis motivated widely held understandings of what it meant for self-determination to be realized for sovereign states and how this principle was undermined by a hierarchical international system. A distinct set of domestic and transnational civil society actors operated alongside more well-known transnational human rights advocacy networks and, in many cases, provided different understandings of and explanations for some of the same human rights abuses. This included arguing that human rights violations were rooted in usurpation of democratic rule by imperialist governments and global capitalists. The case of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, which was largely responsible for igniting the international human rights movement of the 1970s, was one example of this.Footnote ³⁸

1.2 Other Explanations for Changing Approaches to Interference

The expansion of human rights institutions and changing attitudes toward sovereignty and international interference have received significant scholarly attention, and existing scholarship has offered many possible answers to the question of why leaders in the Global South softened their stance on the norm of non-interference and empowered their regional organizations with greater authority over sensitive political issues like human rights. These existing explanations offer important insight into aspects of these changes. However, they also overlook or fail to account for many patterns and dynamics that accompanied these normative shifts and institutional developments. I briefly discuss six existing explanations: norm diffusion, democratization, the rise of transnational advocacy, forum shopping for weaker mechanisms, establishing regional autonomy, and a prior preference for regional enforcement. For each, I discuss how the argument presented in this book accounts for behaviors that these explanations don’t anticipate.

The first three explanations – norm diffusion, democratization, and the rise of transnational advocacy – overlap significantly. They explain the shift away from non-interference by looking to changes in global norms and practice, domestic politics, and the interaction between these domestic and international factors. First, looking at global changes, leaders altered their stance on the relative importance of sovereignty and human rights in response to changing global norms. Some became persuaded of the importance of human rights, while others were pressured to accept them.Footnote ³⁹ Some leaders responded to new material incentives to positively engage with human rights, such as the availability of foreign aid for states that ratified human rights treaties or demonstrated their compliance with human rights norms.Footnote ⁴⁰ In some cases, leaders engaged with international institutions tactically, as a way of fending off international pressure. However, having done so, human rights created new resources for both domestic and international actors to push for societal transformation.Footnote ⁴¹ The transnational human rights advocacy network, which first emerged in the 1970s, was an important source of this pressure, connecting domestic and international civil society and channeling pressure on human rights-abusing governments.Footnote ⁴²

Changes in the global environment interacted with and often reinforced changes in states’ domestic politics, with the most important domestic change being democratization. Leaders of democratizing states had new material incentives to adopt and positively engage with regional human rights institutions and new beliefs that this was the right thing for them to do. Political liberalization within states removed reasons to resist international human rights enforcement and created new incentives to use international institutions to “lock in” political reforms. The political costs of accepting international human rights enforcement, including the loss of national decision-making autonomy, thus came to be outweighed by the benefits of accepting this authority, benefits which also included development assistance, trade, foreign direct investment, and tourism.Footnote ⁴³ These domestic changes also created new desires to be (and be seen as) good citizens of the liberal community of states.Footnote ⁴⁴ Democratization sometimes occurred in the context of pre-existing regional norms of pan-regionalism that were conducive to rethinking sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁵

These explanations account for many of the dynamics that were important in bringing about and consolidating changes discussed in this book. Norm diffusion shifted the global normative environment within which leaders responded to pressure on their human rights records and changed the calculations of leaders who encountered this pressure. The emerging transnational human rights advocacy network was an important part of this normative change and was responsible for much of the pressure on individual governments, though it was also the case that Western governments retained substantial discretion over where and how to pursue human rights enforcement.

It was certainly the case that democratization incentivized leaders of newly democratic states to ratify regional human rights treaties, and differences in democratization within regions help to explain the different outcomes in Africa and Latin America. In Latin America, substantial democratization in the 1980s consolidated the move toward regional enforcement and created conditions in which the regional system could flourish. By contrast, in Africa, democratization took place a decade after states created regional human rights institutions and was much less extensive than in Latin America. As a consequence, it wasn’t until after the end of the Cold War that the regional human rights system really began to function, and once it did, it remained less effective and more constrained by member states.

However, these explanations also fail to account for important dynamics surrounding the creation, acceptance, and expansion of human rights institutions. Most notably, they fail to explain the systematic lack of alignment between actors’ attitudes toward human rights and their attitudes toward human rights enforcement. Leaders that supported human rights often opposed and harshly criticized forms of enforcement that they regarded as counter to the principle of self-determination. They even cooperated with authoritarian leaders to push back against the imposition of human rights enforcement from outside of the region.

At the same time, these same leaders welcomed and supported extra-regional enforcement that conformed to the principle of self-determination and, in many cases, tried to reform global enforcement and create new global institutions that were more consistent with self-determination. This was the case with the creation of a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the addition of human rights institutions to parliamentary bodies shared by states of the Global South and Europe. These explanations also do not explain why, as states democratized and their human rights records improved, they tended to gravitate toward regional institutions over UN institutions, even where enforcement was similarly challenging.

These explanations also do not account for the fact that, prior to the 1970s, leaders of democracies and those that supported human rights had frequently prioritized the norm of non-interference over human rights enforcement. In both Latin America and Africa, important changes in regional attitudes toward human rights and non-interference occurred at times when levels of democracy were low and oppression was widespread. Furthermore, periods of liberalization in both the Middle East and Southeast Asia did not bring about changes in attitudes toward non-interference with respect to human rights.

Finally, and more fundamentally, these explanations fail to fully grapple with the symbolic, historic, and strategic significance of sovereignty in the Global South, where non-interference was widely viewed as a corollary to and means of realizing the right to self-determination. The campaign for the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was launched in 1974, was aimed in part at limiting economic interference and enhancing economic self-determination in developing states. It was widely supported by states across regime type, representing a distinct, alternative conception of global justice.

Rather than being persuaded of sovereignty’s moral flaws, actors across these regions emphasized the normative value of sovereignty and grappled with its tension with individual rights. The idea was shared widely, by both state and non-state actors, that self-determination as realized through sovereign independence and non-interference was itself an important human right. Many civil society actors placed blame for human rights violations, in part, on the exploitation and domination of countries by global capitalism and powerful Western states, an understanding of human rights violations that is far less compatible with Western states acting as agents of enforcement or with a system of human rights enforcement that involves leveraging the economic dependence of the developing world to impose changes in policy or behavior.Footnote ⁴⁶

Another explanation for these changes is that leaders were attempting to hide behind weaker regional human rights institutions, engaging in a type of forum shopping.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, as I show in subsequent chapters, regional institutions had their shortcomings, but they also represented a real, significant break from the norm of non-interference. Rather than toothless institutions created by governments to hide or obscure domestic oppression, these institutions represented a difficult compromise between actors that genuinely wanted better enforcement of human rights and those that stood to be immediately and directly challenged by human rights. This compromise occurred in the shadow of Western enforcement pressure. Many leaders were reluctant to accept these institutions, and once regional institutions were in place, democracies and human rights advocates remained important proponents of them.

Finally, it may have been the case that leaders were attempting to establish regional autonomy or had a general, prior preference for regional enforcement. In other words, leaders were attempting to exclude extra-regional interference and to replace outside enforcement with regional enforcement. They were driven by their belief in the legitimacy of regional organizations, their perception of extra-regional enforcement as domination, and their desire to localize human rights norms to be more consistent with regional human rights norms.Footnote ⁴⁸

Though there was a systematic preference for regional enforcement of human rights, it was not the fact that these authorities were regional per se or that they enforced regional versions of norms that drove this preference. In fact, leaders that supported human rights were frequently open to and enthusiastic about cooperating with extra-regional enforcement where they saw it as consistent with the principle of self-determination, even in cases where it involved cooperation with former colonizing powers. It is also the case that regional institutions and enforcement often did not clearly reflect regional norms, and the very idea that there are internally consistent regional conceptions of human rights is itself contested. The African human rights charter includes content that is said to be more specific to African norms – including individual duties and collective rights – but also includes all the individual rights that are often said to be “Western.” In Latin America, regional conceptions of human rights were already very similar to understandings of human rights outside of the region, and Latin America had played an important role in the construction of human rights norms and institutions in the UN.

Instead, as I argue and attempt to demonstrate in this book, the preference for regional enforcement was due to the fact that regional organizations allow their member states greater opportunities for participation and are more accountable to them. Leaders that supported human rights attempted to reform outside enforcement to make it more equitable and consistent with self-determination rather than eliminate it altogether. Even if leaders had wanted to exclude outside actors, in regions that were vulnerable to interference, this simply may not have been a realistic option. Where there was norm localization, as with the inclusion of the right to development in the African Charter, this may have been a consequence of the ability to meaningfully participate rather than the primary goal.

1.3 Empirical Approach

Both my argument and empirical analysis use a historical institutionalist approach. Historical institutionalism emphasizes the ways that the development and transformation of institutions are the product of power struggles that unfold over time. The design of institutions is, in part, a contest over who can exercise power and how. This approach also gives special attention to the timing and sequencing of events, including how the decision-making calculus of political actors and the constraints under which they operate change over time.Footnote ⁴⁹ Actors made decisions in time, responding to the environment with which they were confronted. This included novel and unprecedented developments like the breakthrough of human rights in the 1970s. They made fateful decisions, including decisions over how to design regional institutions and how and whether to engage with them, and they encountered and responded to unintended consequences of these decisions. In developing my argument, I theorize contingency, critical junctures, and unintended consequences as playing an important role in explaining the creation and development of regional enforcement mechanisms.

In adopting a historical approach, I also attempt to tell a story that reflects the world as it was when these changes took place, rather than seeing regional institutions from the perspective of a “post-sovereign” world. From the latter perspective, many of the institutions that were created and ways of engaging with those institutions that emerged appear unexceptional and even inadequate. Putting these changes in their historical context highlights how dramatic they were, representing significant and unprecedented shifts in how state actors engaged with international interference.

My main empirical evidence consists of three in-depth case studies, examining the Organization of American States, the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union, or AU), and the League of Arab States (or Arab League). I have chosen these organizations because it was in these “macro” regional organizations that states first moved to engage with human rights. These organizations are critical for understanding the decision of states to empower regional organizations with authority to enforce human rights.

In each of these three regions, a strong norm of non-interference had long guided inter-state relations, and in each, leaders used their regional organizations to institutionalize and enforce this norm. In the first two cases, the OAS and OAU/AU, the dependent variable, the compromising of the norm of non-interference, was realized. In the third, the Arab League, it was not. These three regions are also similar and different across important potential explanatory variables, which allows me to consider competing explanations. These include their past engagement with human rights, the degree to which human rights norms cohere with regional norms, levels of regional democratization, and history of a pan-regional identity.

I selected the Arab League for an in-depth case study rather than the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, another important regional organization which also maintained its strict stance toward non-interference. I do so because, within the Arab League, there were early moves to institutionalize human rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s which were curtailed after the changes in Western human rights enforcement in the 1970s. This early institutionalization provides leverage for assessing how the onset of policies challenging states’ self-determination over human rights affected the decision-making of leaders in the region.

Examining the Arab League also helps to address two possible alternative explanations. The first is that variation across regions was simply the result of pre-existing attitudes toward human rights. For both the Arab League and the Organization of African Unity, global human rights norms clashed in significant ways with regional norms, yet in Africa, states managed to overcome this lack of coherence to create regional institutions with many features of a “Western” human rights regime. The second alternative explanation is that variation between regions in whether they compromised on the norm of non-interference is explained by the existence of a pan-regional identity, which ultimately made regions more receptive to softening sovereignty norms.Footnote ⁵⁰ In fact, pre-existing pan-Arab, pan-African, and pan-American identities had historically been an important part of politics in each of these regions. Yet, Middle Eastern leaders resisted interventionist human rights enforcement of any sort long after Africa and Latin America had begun developing their own regional institutions.

Though I do not devote a chapter in this book to tracing the development of human rights institutions in Southeast Asia, dynamics in this region also align with the expectations of my argument. I show in Chapter 3 that, as with the Middle East, Western governments refrained from pressuring Southeast Asian leaders on human rights because doing so would conflict with other, more important foreign policy goals. At this time and in subsequent decades, leaders continued to adhere to the norm of non-interference, a cornerstone of the “ASEAN way.” It was only in the late 2000s that leaders in ASEAN began to develop their own regional human rights institutions, which consist of non-binding and inter-governmental mechanisms aimed at promoting human rights and encouraging cooperation rather than permitting interference.

1.4 Regions and Agency in a Hierarchical World

This book speaks to central questions about world order – why the current world order looks the way that it does, how states engage with this order, and how it is reified or transformed by their engagement. I point to the central role of the Global South in creating an international order in which regions and regional organizations are regarded as having special knowledge, legitimacy, and effectiveness in dealing with issues within their own geographic domain. I treat as my object of study something which has become largely taken for granted: the unique effectiveness and legitimacy of regional organizations. This idea is most evident in the norm of regional solutions to regional problems, a constitutive norm of the international order which articulates a right for regions to special voice over issues affecting them. I explore how establishing regional organizations as authorities has been a way to expand opportunities for voice, participation, and agency by the Global South in the context of a constraining and hierarchical international system.

This active shaping of the international order to privilege regions has been a recurring theme since the end of World War II. As this book makes clear in the case of human rights, regions are not inherently legitimate or effective sites for policymaking. An international order in which regional organizations are regarded as having special status, authority, knowledge, and legitimacy is, in large part, a product of strategic efforts by actors that benefit from their own regional organizations having greater voice and representation.

During the drafting of the UN Charter, it was the independent states of Latin America and the Middle East that pushed for greater recognition of the authority of regional organizations, along with the idea that these organizations should be autonomous from rather than subordinate to the UN. They did so against the ambivalence of the great powers and small European states, who worried that regional organizations would undermine the UN’s authority and reproduce the same alliance politics that had led to two world wars.Footnote ⁵¹ Over the next two decades, a “wave” of regionalism, driven largely by decolonized states forming new organizations, dramatically expanded the number of regional organizations. This expansion was accompanied by questions on the part of the great powers, policymakers, and scholars as to the desirability of regionalism and the appropriate relationship between regional organizations and the United Nations.Footnote ⁵²

A second wave of regionalism after the end of the Cold War was characterized by substantial expansion of the authority and scope of many existing organizations, alongside renewed debates over the role, autonomy, and authority of these new, more assertive regional organizations and the implications of this for the authority of the United Nations and post-Cold War global governance.Footnote ⁵³ In both waves, actors from the Global South played important roles in advocating for the authority of regional organizations and their autonomy from the UN.

A large body of scholarship has problematized the naturalness of regions, asking how regions are formed and how they become meaningful such that they take on the quality of “regionness.”Footnote ⁵⁴ By contrast, there has been less work that questions the naturalness of regions as legitimate sites for policymaking, asks how the authority of regions and a norm of regional solutions to regional problems came to be consolidated, or attempts to understand why and under what circumstances actors from outside of a region, including powerful states, would accept and defer to regional authority.

In addition to speaking to questions about world order, this book also engages with scholarship on international institutions and delegation, bringing it into conversation with scholarship and active debates on international hierarchies. Recent scholarship in IR conceptualizes hierarchies as persistent, non-voluntary structures of domination and subordination that are formed through things like material inequality, asymmetric interdependence, unequal integration into the international system, and inter-subjective beliefs about status.Footnote ⁵⁵ This body of work argues that, from the perspective of subordinate states, “most hierarchies are neither rational nor legitimate; they are just there, seemingly unmovable.”Footnote ⁵⁶

This scholarship challenges earlier work on international hierarchy that conceptualized hierarchies as voluntary, mutually beneficial contracts entered into volitionally and accepted by subordinate states as legitimate.Footnote ⁵⁷ In his influential book, Hierarchies in International Relations, David Lake applies this thinking to US hierarchy in the Caribbean. Lake argues that the United States provides domestic order to Caribbean leaders and protection against domestic threats to their rule, and in exchange, Caribbean leaders accept the US government’s right to issue orders and punish non-compliance. In contrast to this, I suggest in this book that the US is itself often the primary threat to Caribbean leaders and domestic order. US hierarchy often operates like a protection racket in which the “choice” faced by Caribbean governments is to either accede to US demands for compliance, which come with economic and security support, or to face pressure, subversion, or even open intervention by a state with which they are utterly outmatched.Footnote ⁵⁸

This points to both the possibilities for and limits on agency and autonomous decision-making by weaker or dependent states in a hierarchical world, limits which scholarship on international cooperation and delegation have tended to overlook. The decisions of governments of weak or dependent states to cooperate, delegate, or accept international interference are deeply affected by the hierarchical international environment, the need to avoid antagonizing more powerful actors, and the inefficacy of overt resistance. I explore how hierarchy structures the decision-making of subordinate states, including decisions to participate in international institutions and accept and comply with demands from these institutions or from more powerful states. In doing so, I challenge scholarship on international cooperation and delegation that treats decisions to cooperate or delegate – to align policies with other states, ratify treaties, and join or participate in international organizations – as contractual, voluntary decisions made rationally in pursuit of benefits, or as the product of beliefs regarding the legitimacy and appropriateness of certain institutional forms or cooperative goals.Footnote ⁵⁹ Like hierarchies, international institutions are often simply there, appearing to weaker states as inescapable features of the international system.

Having identified these limits on agency and autonomous decision-making, I also highlight the importance of agential, self-determined action as a distinct foreign policy goal and the different ways that actors in the Global South use international institutions to navigate this hierarchical international system to allow for self-determined action and decision-making. Some strategies have been overt and confrontational, aimed at immediate and radical reform.Footnote ⁶⁰ Others have been quietly subversive. These approaches include foot-dragging, mimicking compliant behavior, or telling more powerful states what they want to hear.Footnote ⁶¹ One such approach involves delegating authority to a regional organization, with leaders empowering their own regional organization as a way to increase their voice over both regional and global decision-making. Where leaders expect that overt resistance or contestation will be costly and ineffective, they may pursue these more quiet or accommodationist approaches because they do not look on the surface like contestation or resistance.Footnote ⁶²

Regional organizations are an important tool for transforming hierarchy.Footnote ⁶³ One reason that leaders in the Global South have created regional organizations and expanded their scope and authority is to reshape their international environment to be less hierarchical and to allow more space for self-determined decision-making. Oftentimes, this is not about increasing a region’s isolation, independence, or autonomy. Within a hierarchical international system in which they occupy subordinate positions, increasing the authority and status of regional organizations and arguing for the legitimacy of regional self-rule is a way for weaker states to transform hierarchies to increase their voice and to expand opportunities for participating in global decision-making.

Finally, this book contributes to debates and scholarship on international norms and human rights. I provide a different understanding of why states would support human rights, or other international norms, while objecting to their enforcement. Rather than this simply being a case of what Stephen Krasner refers to as “organized hypocrisy,” supporting a norm only when it is instrumentally beneficial or aligns with other strategic goals, I argue that leaders may genuinely care about human rights but view certain forms of enforcement as inappropriate. As I show, leaders in the Global South viewed the use of economic pressure to enforce human rights as a violation of the right to self-determination, as well as contrary to norms of sovereign equality, partnership, and universal representation.Footnote ⁶⁴

A large body of scholarship on the history of human rights has identified the 1970s as the time when the modern human rights regime took shape. It was at this time that human rights, as they are now understood and enforced at the international level, were consolidated.Footnote ⁶⁵ I identify an important and under-explored part of this change: the transformation of human rights into a regional issue, with regional organizations becoming one of the main pieces of international human rights enforcement. Though some regional human rights institutions had existed prior to the 1970s, regional enforcement changed dramatically in the 1970s. Additionally, it was only in the 1970s that the idea took hold that regional organizations should be at the center of the global human rights regime. I show that these transformations were a strategic response to another change that occurred at this time – the sudden incorporation of human rights into the foreign policies of Western states.Footnote ⁶⁶

The rest of this book proceeds as follows. Chapter 2 lays out my argument in two parts. I first explore the concept of self-determination as it was understood by state and non-state actors in the Global South to govern legitimate relations between states and the legitimate exercise of power in the international system. I elaborate on two conditions that distinguish between international authority that is consistent with or even an expression of self-determination and illegitimate domination: domestic affirmation and meaningful participation. These conditions capture how the relationship between self-determination and international rules was understood by a diverse set of actors that were motivated by similar concerns over global inequality and the exploitation of the weakness and economic dependence of post-colonial states. I discuss the important role of international institutions in realizing this principle and limiting practices that conflict with it.

Second, I detail how expanding the scope and authority of regional organizations can be a way to create these conditions. Regional organizations and regional governance provide opportunities for states to participate more effectively in international decision-making, to limit the use of power to impose rules, and to manage the involvement of outside actors in the region. Their formal design, including decision-making rules, consultation mechanisms, and membership composition, and their informal norms, like consensus decision-making, institutionalize broader participation in decision-making and restrict the imposition of rules. I expand on my argument that, in the case of human rights, persuading others to accept and defer to regional authority necessitated giving regional institutions authority to interfere in members’ domestic affairs.

In Chapters 3 through 6, I turn to providing empirical evidence for my argument. Chapter 3 explores the changes in the global human rights regime that took place in the 1970s. At this time, Western governments began to impose human rights enforcement by incorporating human rights considerations in their trade and aid relationships with developing states. They did so first in an ad hoc, targeted manner and then as a widespread and institutionalized system of carrots and sticks. Due to the presence or absence of countervailing economic and national security interests, these policies affected Latin America and Africa, while the Middle East and Southeast Asia were spared these same pressures. Transnational human rights advocacy networks emerged at this time, demanding and legitimizing action by Western governments to enforce human rights throughout the world and delegitimizing appeals to the norm of non-interference by leaders in the Global South.

The changes detailed in Chapter 3 demanded a new response by leaders in Latin America and Africa. Chapters 4 and 5 examine how the strategy of establishing regional authority over human rights emerged in these two regions in response to economic pressure, evolving into an approach employed by democracies and a range of actors that supported human rights enforcement, as well as by authoritarian states that were challenged by human rights enforcement. In Chapter 6, I look at the Middle East, a region in which these changes did not occur. As I discuss, the breakthrough of human rights in the 1970s coincided with the Middle East’s increased geopolitical importance in Western foreign policy and the explosion of oil wealth in the region, effectively short-circuiting advances toward developing human rights institutions that had taken place up to this point.

In Chapter 7, I conclude by discussing the implications of this argument for other areas of international relations scholarship and for contemporary international politics. I discuss the ongoing importance of regional authority and self-determination in the international politics of the Global South. I also consider how theorizing from the perspective of the Global South can lead to more complete understandings of contemporary political phenomena, providing better explanations for things like dissatisfaction with liberal norms and institutions, openness to cooperation with illiberal powers by states that respect liberal norms, and present-day dynamics of regionalism, including the creation of “new” regions and the growth of “authoritarian” regional organizations. I consider the implications and long-term effects of human rights – a discourse intended to empower people and provide them with the agency to realize their own freedom – being implemented in ways that undermine self-rule and limit political agency.