The least likely case study is a noble tradition in comparative politics, while the study of norm change is a cutting-edge concern in international relations. Lisa S. Alfredson's well-crafted account of the introduction of gender-based asylum in Canada combines the best of these worlds, along with interesting observations on immigration policy, social movements, and the gendered nature of human rights. It should be widely read for its insight into how a group of utterly powerless non-citizens, suffering a poorly understood genre of abuse, secured principled recognition and protection from a liberal state—which in turn became an international promoter of the new norm.

The assassination, assault, torture, discrimination, imprisonment, and enslavement of a significant proportion of half of the world's population is a major source of human rights violations, and the majority of women who suffer such gender-based oppression at the hands of private actors rather than state authorities are often denied political recognition or remedy. As a gender-based refugee profiled in this study put it, “[t]he discrimination and repression I lived with in Saudi Arabia had political and not cultural roots. When governments impose a certain set of beliefs on individuals, through propaganda, violence or torture, we are dealing not with culture but rather with political expendiency” (p. 143). Feminist theory and transnational activism have begun to establish that “women's rights are human rights” for state-sponsored abuses linked to international violence, like rape as a war crime. But chronic and internalized structural violence against women is often hidden beneath a veil of sovereignty and claims of cultural difference.

A foreign state is, thus, the least likely source of remedy for sex persecution, and such a struggle for gender equity is a compelling test case for the power and challenges of transnational socialization and mobilization. Moreover, refugee policy is a telling and consequential test of humanitarian internationalism, since the state must sacrifice its default “national interest” in limiting migration to uphold international law. The dialectical process of norm change in the Canadian state contributes to our understanding of human rights reform worldwide, and is typical of the dynamic identified in Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink's “spiral model” (see Thomas Risse, Steve Ropp, Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights, 1999).

Alfredson tells the story of Canada's adoption of gender-based asylum in 1993, a policy that subsequently diffused to a dozen other countries. Following a communicative action campaign by asylum seekers and advocacy groups, Canada drafted new refugee admission standards and processes to encompass gender-based persecution, defined to include state-negligent and severe domestic violence, FGM, and state prosecution for women's resistance to state-mandated discriminatory restrictions on dress and social behavior. These new refugee policies resulted in a measurable increase in refugee admissions on the basis of gender that brought acceptance rates for gender-based claims on a par with other forms of persecution, affecting thousands of women. The initial guidelines were strengthened via a 1996 update that also enhanced policy procedures to be more attentive to gender-based persecution.

The content of the Canadian model encompasses four gendered categories of persecution: gendered forms of harm (such as sexual violence) for persecution on some other basis, persecution on the basis of kinship, state collusion or negligence in protecting female citizens from severe discrimination or violence by private actors, and persecution for “transgressing, certain gender-discriminating religious or customary laws and practices” (pp. 5–6). Such recognition of a new and complicated basis for refugee admissions clearly contradicted the dispositions of immigration officials, who stated their resistance the previous year on bureaucratic grounds, reversing course only after a concerted campaign that appealed to core Canadian values. Another measure of the success of socialization on this issue was its rapid diffusion to a set of diverse but “like-minded” humanitarian states, such as Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and Sweden, at a time when most were grappling with restricting migration on other grounds. The culmination of this modeling was the 2002 adoption of U.N. High Commission on Refugees Guidelines on International Protection: Gender-Related Persecution (HCR/GIP/02/01, May 7, 2002), which explicitly cited the influence of pilot standards in Canada, the U.S., and Australia, and a corresponding EU directive in 2004.

The core of the social movement campaign was a set of media statements and interviews by half a dozen representative asylum seekers who told their stories, as well as group statements by women refugees from eighteen different countries, capturing the public imagination. They were supported by a number of prominent Canadian refugee, women's, and religious organizations, and they benefited from the fact that Canada has a relatively influential and internationalist civil society (see Alison Brysk, Global Good Samaritans: Human Rights as Foreign Policy, 2009).

In response to several prior legal appeals in the early 1990s, the Canadian government initially contended that its policies were legitimated by the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was “gender neutral.” Nevertheless, the defensive response characteristic of the middle stages of the spiral model was evident when the immigration minister's office replied to NGO queries, “[T]he position of the government with respect to the persecution of women is irrelevant to the refugee status determination process. Nonetheless, let me assure you that the Minister does not condone discrimination against, or persecution of, women” (pp. 191–92). When the Canadian flagship human rights organization ICHRDD joined the campaign, it appealed to another aspect of transnational socialization specific to Canada's foreign policy niche: “If [Nada] is forced to return to her country, Canada will be sending out a signal that it will not act to oppose the systematic violation of women's human rights…. This would be most unfortunate, given the important initiatives that Canada has taken on behalf of gender equality and human rights in the Francophonie, the Commonwealth, and the Organization of American States” (p. 195, my emphasis).

The domestic “mobilization of shame” deepened when the president of the ICHRDD, former MP Ed Broadbent, wrote an editorial for the country's two leading newspapers (the Globe and Mail and La Presse) that, in the words of one colleague, “embarrassed the hell out of the government.” This time, the government adopted a culturally relative refusal to “impose its values on the rest of the world”—unwittingly radicalizing the public debate. The minister ended up retracting this statement, promising the new policy guidelines, and announcing consideration of representations to the United Nations (pp. 202–4).

Alfredson's book is well documented and judiciously combines documentary evidence with interviews with leading participants. She draws on a wide range of literatures in human rights, international relations, and social movement theory. Unfortunately, she draws too heavily and ineffectively on social movement theories, while insufficiently emphasizing her study's truly innovative contribution to debates on transnational norm change. In a similar vein, an intriguing discussion of citizenship and the sources of new rights in the last chapter is not sufficient to “sell” the Canada case to the general reader, and whets the appetite for firmer generalizable implications. Nevertheless, this book is a model contribution to scholarship on human rights and international norm change, and it advances our understanding of the plight and progress of some of the world's most powerless denizens.