North Korean Human Rights: Naming and Shaming

A while back, there was an exchange between John Feffer and Roberta Cohen on North Korean human rights. John argued that naming-and-shaming are ineffective, if not counter-productive and instead argued for a human security approach to human rights (i.e. provide aid and development assistance). I later weighed in on the politics between these two camps.

I thought about John's point again on whether naming-and-shaming actually works on North Korea. Roberta mentioned that they did sign the UN Treaty on Human Rights as a sign of progress; this might be stage two of Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink's five-stage spiral model on human rights change. I was reminded though, thanks to a post on the Duck, that there actually is academic literature on the effectiveness of naming-and-shaming strategies. Amanda Murdie and Dylan Davis ran a quantitative analysis on this using some creative (in a good way) methods to measure shaming and human rights change. Cullen Hendrix and Wendy Wong also have a forthcoming article in BJPS.

The verdict: Yes, naming-and-shaming do have a qualified/conditional impact. Translation: naming-shaming has to be done under certain conditions (i.e. they're effective on autocratic but not democratic regimes) and in conjunction with some other factors (i.e. when domestic NGOs are present are INGOs are also weighing in). For North Korea then, human rights activism may have at least a weak effect on the regime: there are no domestic NGOs or civil society to support transnational activists, but there is pressure from the UN and North Korea is autocratic.