Does soft power matter in global politics? Even in an era of a rising China and a resurgent Russia, all but perhaps the most die-hard realist would recognize that it does play a role. The more important question to ask is when, how, and under what conditions it does so. The latter is precisely the goal of H. Richard Friman’s The Politics of Leverage in International Relations. Focusing on a particular aspect of soft power—naming and shaming strategies—the volume provides a carefully argued analysis of their possibilities and limits. First made popular in the human rights field with states as targets (e.g., Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998), such strategies are now deployed against a wide range of nonstate actors as well, from multinational corporations to rebel groups fighting civil wars.
The signal contribution of Friman’s volume is to unpack that phrase—“naming and shaming.” More formally, it disaggregates the term into several distinct mechanisms, and explores the conditions and contexts that shape their influence. The volume consists of three parts, with introductory and concluding chapters by Friman bracketing the substantive core—an exploration of naming and shaming strategies within and beyond human rights.
In Chapter 1, Friman reviews and critiques the existing literature, which has shown that naming and shaming influence actor behavior. However, with few exceptions (e.g., Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance, 2013), that same work stops short. That is, we want to know more specifically how shaming works. Is it through individual psychology? Social opprobrium? What facilitates or hinders it? While Friman provides no definitive answers to such questions, he does promise to “derive a framework” (p. 26) for addressing them in the final chapter. This has the benefit of letting his contributors explore broadly and creatively, without being constrained by some prior, specified argument.
Following the opening essay, the volume’s core consists of nine chapters that explore strategies of naming or shaming at work—or not at work. The contributors should be commended for examining the latter issue, for it is only through an exploration of “non-cases” that we fully grasp the power of such strategies. Of the four essays on human rights, two stand out. In Chapter 4, Dongwook Kim carefully employs statistical analysis to explain more clearly when naming and shaming do have effects; this represents value added for a human rights literature whose modal form of analysis is—with few exceptions (e.g., Beth Simmons, Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics, 2009)—the qualitative case study.
If Kim’s contribution is methodological, then Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm’s (Chapter 5) is substantive—pushing the human rights literature to explore naming and shaming in a new area: transitional justice. While primarily descriptive, his analysis nonetheless provides an important net assessment, noting, for example, how the naming and shaming strategies of international courts can perpetuate cycles of violence and human rights abuses.
The five chapters in Part II look at naming and shaming beyond human rights—an excellent move that promises to broaden the debate over it. While four are empirical assessments of the strategy’s effectiveness in different areas (money laundering, drug control, targeted sanctions, multinational corporations), Chapter 6 by Joshua Busby and Kelley Greenhill stands out for its theoretical ambition, providing the theoretical framework missing in Friman’s opening essay. The authors literally do it all, from unpacking naming and shaming into discrete causal mechanisms to identifying the sequence in which they occur to articulating scope conditions for their successful employment. However, since the argument is never applied, it is impossible to assess whether it does indeed offer a more “empirically accurate, and testable improvement over the alternatives” (p. 120). The argument is so complex, with so many moving parts, that it is not clear what such testing might in any case entail.
Friman’s concluding chapter (11) summarizes the volume’s empirical findings and analytic insights. Readers will come away with a better sense of what naming and shaming entails and of its possibilities and limits. However, despite his assertion that the chapter will advance “a framework for analysis of naming and shaming” (p. 201), this never happens. He tells us that he will offer no “theory of leverage”—which is fine. Unfortunately, Friman’s preferred alternative amounts to little more than calling for a broader conceptualization of naming and shaming and of leverage more generally.
In sum, The Politics of Leverage does several things very well. It helps scholars think more systematically about naming and shaming—how to conceptualize and disaggregate them, and explore more carefully what work they do. Equally important, these insights are applied to a number of policy areas beyond international human rights. The volume thus provides much-needed analytic precision to broad claims about the role of soft power in global politics.
At the same time, international relations theorists—and this is clearly the community to whom Friman and contributors speak—will find the volume somewhat frustrating. Theoretically, the parts do not add up to an integrated whole. The volume advances many intriguing claims about how, when, and why naming and shaming influence the behavior of state and nonstate actors. However, with very few exceptions—see, especially, Chapter 10 by Virginia Haufler—the chapters do not speak to one another. Moreover, Friman’s efforts to pull everything together theoretically in the concluding essay fall short.
Then again—and to be fair to Friman and the contributors—how many edited volumes advance the theoretical state of the art? Not many. Even if we accept this fact and reduce our expectations accordingly, there is a missed opportunity here, but now at the level of the individual essays. With the exception of Chapters 1, 6, and 10, this is a richly empirical volume. In multiple issue areas, the contributors recount fascinating stories of the ways in which naming and shaming played a role—from multinationals changing their operations in African conflict zones to South American truth commissions refusing “to name names.”
Yet without some minimal attention to methods and data, it is difficult for readers to gauge the plausibility of these arguments. While Chapters 4 (Kim) and 9 (Thomas Biersteker) do address such matters, the other contributions are methods free. This leaves readers wondering how exactly the arguments were constructed.
For sure, a lack of transparency in qualitative methods is a long-running problem in international relations, as well as other subfields. However, tools and how-to guides are now available—from work on case studies (e.g., John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices, 2007) to process tracing (e.g., Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, eds., Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool, 2015)—to make more clear the analytic foundations of the qualitative, mechanism-based studies that form the core of this volume. The goal should not be methods-heavy, unreadable texts, but rich accounts whose data and methods are sufficiently clear for outsiders to evaluate the claims advanced.
These criticisms need to be kept in context. It is the well-written and well-structured analysis offered by Friman and his collaborators that makes it easy for a sympathetic reviewer to find gaps. While The Politics of Leverage may not be the last word in parsing the roles of soft power and naming and shaming, it is nonetheless a very good start—one on which those with more ambitious theoretical and methodological agendas should build.
