Analyzing NGO Communications to Understand Contestation and Collaboration with Governments Across Human Rights Issues

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Human rights organizations (HR NGOs), such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Amnesty International, use a range of strategies to improve human rights and social conditions around the world. Some strategies take the form of overt and direct criticism of states to punish and deter repression of citizens, known as "naming and shaming". Other strategies involve positive cooperation with governments to change legal and de facto protections of rights and freedoms. To date, we know little about which strategy is more effective, because systematic research on this topic has ignored direct collaboration between these organizations and states. Instead, there has been a recent explosion in the number of social science studies examining the efficacy of contentious strategies. This research will provide new insight into whether such cooperative strategies are an effective means to improve human rights and social conditions. This project is the first to analyze the large-scale digital communications from human rights non-governmental organizations (HR NGOs) to understand the specific issues and contexts where cooperation can be successfully implemented. The researchers will demonstrate the usefulness of this approach through quantitative text analysis procedure analyzing a wide range of digitally available information (i.e. press releases, published reports, newsletters, and social media posts from multiple HR NGOs). These are an especially rich source of information as they contain both cooperative and confrontational signals to states. The research team plans to build theoretically informed models that predict 1) the issues and circumstances that provide incentives for government-HR NGO partnerships versus public criticism known as "naming and shaming," and 2) when particular HR NGO strategies ultimately lead to the desired changes in state behavior. This research has the potential to enhance the well-being of society by providing a better understanding of strategies that improve human rights performance around the world. It is also poised to make an important contribution in helping to foster collaboration between the social sciences and other STEM disciplines.