Over the last two decades, a change has occurred in the nature of trade agreements. No longer just focused on trade, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) increasingly include significant human rights conditionality. In particular, between the 1980s and the 2000s, the United States and Europe have gone from having no human rights clauses in their bilateral and regional trade agreements to including coercive and mutually binding penalties for human rights violations in agreements in a seemingly unrelated issue area. In Forced to Be Good, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton unpacks this puzzle around four central questions: 1) Why have the United States and the European Union included human rights clauses in their trade agreements? 2) Why has there been a difference in the approach of the United States and the EU? 3) Why have repressive governments signed up to the agreements? 4) Have the agreements made any difference for human rights?

The way in which Hafner-Burton answers these questions is by bringing politics back into the picture, bridging the domestic and international to excellent effect. She begins by telling us why the dominant existing explanations—the role of domestic interest groups and the role of norm entrepreneurship—are by themselves inadequate. Shunning monocausal explanation, she instead provides the reader with a nuanced account of the process through which what may begin as domestic preferences or human rights norms are transformed through their encounters with politics and process, often leading them to be changed and incorporated in trade agreements in unanticipated ways.

The book's analytical model is based on a three-stage process that shapes policy outcomes (i.e., the human rights content of the PTAs): 1) preferences (of domestic policymakers in the United States and Europe); 2) institutions (the rules of the game for determining influence over trade negotiations in the United States and Europe); and 3) power (capabilities over the partner countries). While ideas about human rights may enter this process in relatively pure form, they are altered and filtered in unanticipated ways at each stage. Rather than human rights standards being adopted purely for human rights reasons per se, Hafner-Burton argues, they are used by policymakers to solve problems often related to parochial interests that have little to do with human rights.

Making excellent use of process tracing grounded in a rich variety of primary sources, the book is structured along the lines of the three stages of the analytical model, demonstrating that with each stage, preferences, institutions, and power matter for both why and how human rights have come to be integrated in particular PTAs. Within each stage, the account is rich, sophisticated, and highly readable. The book strikes a good balance: It is strongly analytical while simultaneously readable and empirically rich. Along the way, we are introduced to a wide variety of actors and structures—domestic interest groups, elected politicians, national constitutions, legislative processes, trade negotiators, and repressive governments. Hafner-Burton succeeds both in making complexity parsimonious and in telling a compelling story.

One of the great strengths of the book is breadth of the argument and, hence, of its empirical coverage. International relations has a vogue for monocausality and for framing puzzles in dependent variable–independent variable terms, which often obscure causal richness. This book instead embraces politics and unpacks causal process in all their complexity. It offers an object lesson for the ways in which scholars and graduate students can think about complex puzzles that transcend domestic and international politics. However, in attempting to cover such a range—of questions, stages of causal process, time periods and states—the inevitable trade-off is that at times the evidence base can seem a little thin, and that occasionally important and contestable empirical claims are reduced to assertions. For example, in unpacking “preferences,” a range of “crises”—such as Yugoslavia and Haiti in the immediate post–Cold War aftermath—are cited as having causal importance (p. 76), but only a narrative claim that they existed in the background is used to substantiate causal impact. While the macro-causal logic of the book is strong, its analysis of micro-level processes is therefore more cursory, often resting on unsubstantiated claims about motives, interests, and background conditions, in which we are required to take Hafner-Burton's word for it.

This, in turn, leaves the reader potentially skeptical about some of the broader claims. How much are the empirics being shoe-horned into the analytical framework? In particular, Hafner-Burton is implicitly dismissive of the role of ideas and norms in her causal story. She acknowledges that the force of human rights norms and hence ideas represent an important alternative explanation. Yet, rather than engage in an open debate with those alternative frameworks, her approach is to co-opt them to her inherently rationalist explanation: “[T]o be sure, the moral discourse on human rights has evolved tremendously … yet it is clear that moral norms did not find a clear path to regulation” (p. 83). While rationalist scholars will be intuitively sympathetic to the focus on interests and institutions, those with more constructivist proclivities will be left wondering whether the role of ideas and norms are underplayed.

This is a book that matters for both policy and theory; it has potentially huge implications for the practice of human rights and for the study of politics and international relations. Policymakers and practitioners will find really valuable insights that enable them to better understand the processes by which human rights become part of trade agreements. In unpacking causal process, Hafner-Burton offers insights into the levers and mechanisms for real-world change. At the level of theory, it gives us new ways to methodologically and analytically bridge the domestic–international divide. It also tells us something of potentially much wider significance about how it is that issue linkages emerge and issue areas become intertwined or nested within the institutional structures of other seemingly unrelated issue areas.

Yet in both cases, the book is strangely understated in the claims it makes about its wider implications. Its policy conclusions are ambivalent, telling us that “policymakers … are primarily motivated by their own self-preservation to put human rights standards into trade agreements, but these regulations can indeed make a difference in countries guilty of abusing human rights” (p. 164); yet that the human rights clauses work when there are “enough meaningful incentives and commitment instruments” but that they are “not the ideal form of human rights governance.” While these conclusions are entirely consistent logically, they present an incomplete picture of the way forward in policy terms. What are the insights for human rights promotion through trade agreements? Should they be pursued or not, and, if so, how? Similarly, at the level of theoretical implications, the book is understated, and the conclusion shies away from engaging in bigger debates with international relations theory or from deriving wider conceptual implications. We are left on the final page with the idea that politics has “changed the face of economic statecraft” (p. 174) in unanticipated ways that have implications for human rights and the international political economy, but we are left wondering about implications that the book has for our conceptual understanding of the world.

Overall, this is a highly accessible and original book that deserves to be widely read and cited, both for the compelling and important story it tells as for its potentially wider contribution to political science and international relations. Hafner-Burton has an immense talent for framing and analytically unpacking complex empirical puzzles. In Forced to Be Good, she uses it to great effect to highlight the changing nature of the politics of both trade and human rights.