Kathryn Sikkink argues that the United States government has sent mixed signals to the governments of Latin American countries about the importance of respect for human rights. The book provides detailed descriptions of U.S. policies that promoted better and worse human rights practices in particular countries over the past 30 years. She notes several cases where the U.S. government sent mixed signals by being strong on general human rights rhetoric, but by not pressing human rights concerns when dealing with Latin American governments facing domestic rebellions. The willingness of the U.S. government to support anticommunist, counterrevolutionary and antiterrorist policies has been much stronger than any desire to promote good human rights practices in the region. In the author's view, these were the wrong priorities.

Besides this contradiction between words and deeds, the United States also has sent mixed signals because it has adopted strong bilateral policies on the promotion of human rights but has no multilateral human rights policies. States have a bilateral human rights policy when their governments take human rights into account when making policies toward other states. They have a multilateral policy on human rights if they are willing to submit their own internal human rights practices to international review. During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States adopted several policies designed to promote better human rights practices by other governments of the world. The origins and contents of these policies are described in Part I of the book. Since that time, the U.S. government has included human rights considerations in its bilateral policies toward Latin America, at least to some extent. However, as the author notes, “The United States has been unwilling to ratify any international human rights treaty with teeth” (p. 10). The government has not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights or accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or even joined the International Criminal Court. These, she argues, would be minimal first steps toward a multilateral human rights policy. She notes that unlike the United States, every country in Europe has both a bilateral and multilateral human rights policy.

The central theoretical question of the book concerns this puzzle: What factors lead any state to adopt human rights policies in the first place? After all, bilateral human rights policies can make it harder to achieve other economic and military foreign policy objectives, and multilateral human rights policies require that a nation cede some of its sovereignty. Beyond this general question, the author wonders why the United States, in particular, is the only economically developed country to have a bilateral human rights policy but no multilateral one. She discusses five alternative theories: realism, critical theory, liberalism, ideational theory, and institutionalism.

Sikkink argues that ideational theory and institutionalism are the most useful in explaining the support for a bilateral human rights policy and lack of a multilateral human rights policy in the United States. Ideational theory emphasizes the role of ideas and norms in effecting political change. It provides the best explanation for the development of a strong bilateral human rights policy by the U.S. government. She explains that ideational theories are often called “constructivist” theories because they are concerned with how human consciousness constructs the social world (p. 15). At the risk of oversimplification, the basic idea here is that the United States has a strong bilateral human rights policy mainly because the American people strongly support the idea of universal, individual human rights. By “institutionalism,” Sikkink refers to theories that stress the importance of institutions and institutional rules. According to the author, difficult treaty ratification rules under the U.S. Constitution have been the main reason for the absence of a multilateral human rights policy. The creation of the Bureau of Human Rights within the Department of State, on the other hand, has helped to prevent some administrations from backsliding on the U.S. commitment to promote better human rights practices through its foreign policy.

Sikkink points to the importance of nongovernmental human rights organizations in supporting the development of bilateral and multilateral human rights policies in the United States, introducing human rights ideas into international political discourse, and transforming human rights ideas into international norms. This emphasis on the role of transnational nongovernmental forces in advancing human rights ideas also was a central theme of her 1999 book with Margaret E. Keck entitled Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. That book won the 1999 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Despite the mixed signals sent by U.S. foreign policy, Sikkink believes that strong public support within the United States for human rights ideas, external pressure from activist groups, and certain institutions and institutional rules have produced improvements in human rights practices in Latin America. As examples, she points to the long-term expansion of the right to participate in the selection of government leaders, the right to freedom of speech and press, and the right to freedom of association. She believes that U.S. foreign policy has been at least partly responsible for the democratization of most governments in Latin America over the past 30 years. In the late 1970s, she notes, almost all governments in the region were authoritarian. Now, almost all are democratic.

However, the author does worry that the war against terrorism will lead the United States to repeat the mistakes of the past. Indeed, the most important policy implication of the book is that in the past, the U.S. government encouraged many Latin American governments to wage wars on terrorism without regard to the rule of law, leading to massive violations of human rights. Some Latin American governments, with U.S. approval and sometimes with the active assistance of the U.S. government, wrongly imprisoned, tortured, killed, and caused to disappear thousands, even tens of thousands, of their own citizens. This was a mistaken path for them and for the U.S. government, she argues, because the only effective, long-term solution to the problem of terrorism is one that promotes democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

As evidence of the beginning of a regression to the policies of the past, the author points to the U.S. government-backed coup in Venezuela against the elected populist president, Hugo Chavez, in 2002. After the coup, the White House spokesperson did not condemn it. Instead, he suggested that the U.S. government was happy that President Chavez was gone. In contrast, the Organization of American States quickly and strongly condemned the coup. Congressional, NGO, and media critics demanded that the administration explain its actions. Partly as a result, Hugo Chavez was restored to office. So here we have another mixed signal. The regional institutions and norms protecting human rights and democracy were strong partly because of the influence of the United States. They were so strong that they trumped U.S. short-term interests that would have led to a violation of those same norms.

Mixed Signals is an excellent account of the development of U.S. human rights policy, with a special emphasis on Latin America. It is impressive in its empirical scope, careful documentation, and analytic subtlety. It will prove useful to scholars and students.