Human rights norms are today a central aspect of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda. After decades of exclusive attention to the behavior of states, human rights activists began during the late 1980s and 1990s to increase their pressures on corporate actors and demand commitment to and compliance with basic human rights in the business world. Unlike states, corporations lack international legal personality and cannot express commitment by signing on to formal international human rights treaties. Apart from voluntary standards, codes of conduct, and other United Nations standard-setting activities directed at businesses (Mantilla 2009), the Global Compact (GC) represents to date the main UN-sanctioned soft law designed to commit corporations to international standards of human rights and environmental protection. The GC does not replace the main compliance mechanisms set out by the legal obligations assumed by states under international law, but its goal is to supplement those existing mechanisms with an additional, non-binding avenue of promoting universal human rights principles (Rasche 2009; Shelton 2000).

The GC has attracted the most diverse membership, making it the “world’s leading corporate citizenship initiative” (Annan 2006). With its emphasis on corporate citizenship, not legal accountability, as well as low entry barriers and minimal reporting requirements, the Compact offers a compelling test case for the significance of discourses, learning, and capacity-building as pathways to compliance. The GC pursues an explicit strategy of using low entry barriers as well as “norm diffusion and the dissemination of practical know-how and tools” (Ruggie 2007: 820) to quickly expand the reach of its norms into the corporate sector. It uses non-coercive measures for achieving its goals by creating incentives connected to a firm’s reputation-building efforts. But commitment to norms is meaningless if it does not have an impact on the behavior and compliance of private actors. In this chapter, we focus on compliance and ask if membership in the GC has a positive impact on the behavior of corporations or is merely a public relations stunt designed to “blue-wash” their image by adding the UN logo to the corporate social responsibility (CSR) statements.

Transnational non-governmental organizations (TNGOs) in general, and advocacy groups in particular, have gained considerable visibility and influence in global affairs. Since its creation in 1961, Amnesty International has become an authority on human rights issues around the world. Oxfam, Greenpeace, and Doctors Without Borders have gained a similar status on global issues related to development, the environment, and humanitarian relief, respectively. As these organizations have become significant players in global affairs, scholars across a variety of academic fields have begun to analyze the power of transnational advocacy organizations and their networks (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). The majority of early studies in the academic field of international relations viewed advocacy organizations as altruistic actors seeking to advance universally accepted principles. More recent scholarship responding to the principled advocacy literature has argued that TNGOs are better understood as interest-driven actors motivated primarily by the imperative of organizational survival in a competitive environment (Cooley and Ron, 2002; Bob, 2005; Ron, Ramos, and Rodgers, 2005).

In this chapter, we take a different approach to the study of advocacy organizations by inquiring into the nature of transnational advocacy itself as well as its organization as a collective endeavor at both the level of individual organizations and the level of networks. To answer questions about the role of advocacy in contemporary transnational activism, we rely on evidence collected in a large-scale study based on 152 interviews with leaders of transnational non-governmental organizations registered in the United States.

The tremendous growth of the non-governmental sector both in the Western and Southern world has lately also led to an increasing academic interest in the subject matter. In the human rights area, a sizable literature has emerged which identified international and domestic human rights groups and their networking activities as an increasingly influential factor for regime change (see Brysk 1993; Risse et al. 1999; Schmitz and Sikkink 2001; Smith et al. 1997). In particular, this literature highlights strategies on the part of those actors that aim at building direct connections between the local and the international level (see Keck and Sikkink 1998). These actions tell previously untold stories and represent attempts to connect what is traditionally separated by “Westphalian sovereignty” (Krasner 1999: 20–25) and the norm of non-intervention in internal affairs. Challenges to the status quo presuppose the emergence of alternative networks and discourses. The emergence of such transboundary formations in the non-governmental realm makes “extraversion” (Bayart 1993) a viable strategy not only for state leaders but also for their challengers. During the 1980s, international human rights organizations, but also Western states and international organizations, have increasingly taken up such requests for support and supplemented pressure from below with pressure from above. In the Kenyan case this has forced the regime under attack to adopt an introverted strategy of mobilizing its own domestic support.

Introduction

Kenya and Uganda were both subject to intensive global human rights campaigns by international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Alarming reports on the Ugandan human rights situation appeared in the early 1970s shortly after Idi Amin had staged a successful military coup. The human rights situation worsened throughout Amin's dictatorship and hardly improved after he was himself removed from power by violent means in 1979. Until early 1986 a civil war between government troops and various rebel groups led to continued gross violations of human rights. The situation slowly improved after the National Resistance Movement (NRM) as the main rebel organization took control of the main capital Kampala in January 1986.

Kenya came into the limelight of international attention in the mid- 1980s. In contrast to Uganda, increased human rights abuses were not a result of the militarization of politics and subsequent civil war. Moreover, the extent of human rights abuses was never comparable to the atrocities perpetrated in Uganda during the 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, human rights conditions deteriorated in Kenya because an increasingly powerful executive showed declining tolerance for political dissent and developed a personal and paternalistic style of rule. This development began under the independence president Jomo Kenyatta and continued until his death in 1978. During the 1980s, it was perfected by his successor Daniel arap Moi. After considerable transnational mobilization against the Kenyan government and subsequent domestic turbulence in 1991/1992, the executive was forced into a fragile political and constitutional reform process.