This study’s genesis was the author’s early interest in the non-governmental organization (NGO), Amnesty International (AI). Amnesty International has long been recognized for its advocacy and agenda-setting ability with regard to a certain subset of human rights relating to the integrity of individuals (for example, their freedom from torture). However, very little scholarly attention had been paid to the question of why AI had been so successful in its advocacy efforts to raise the political salience of these particular rights at the international level. Nor, more broadly, had sufficient attention been paid to providing explanations for any NGO’s ability to do so in a context where the hierarchy of what may be considered “human rights” is widely contested.

Wendy Wong’s answer to this question is that the way in which a particular NGO is internally organized matters. Her main thesis is that an NGO’s ability to differentially affect the political saliency of any specific human rights issue (or cluster of issues) is primarily a function of its organizational structure. In this regard, she argues that a structure that centralizes agenda-proposing and internal compliance functions while decentralizing the actual implementation of the proposed human rights policies will experience the highest degree of success. First, it will increase the saliency of the organization itself with attendant increases in its status, influence, and legitimacy within the larger network of NGOs concerned with human rights. And secondly, it will increase the political salience of the norm for which it advocates, leading to greater collective recognition of its legitimate and permanent place in the human rights norm hierarchy.

With regard to this central thesis concerning the importance of NGO organizational structure in explaining the political salience of particular human rights norms, Wong recognizes that there are some well-established alternative explanations. Some scholars such as Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink have long argued that it is the intrinsic nature of the particular right in question that largely determines its salience and resonance at the global level. Others such as Stephen Krasner have argued that the most powerful states in the international system at any given point in time will always determine which norms and associated standards are salient. Regardless of the nature of these counter-arguments, Wong finds them less than compelling in their general lack of attention to the issue of human agency (p. 9).

Wong’s book is organized so as to first sharpen and deepen her conception of the dependent variable (political salience) and to explain how she believes it can best be measured. In addition to existing measures that rely either on the degree to which a particular norm has received legal recognition (its degree of legalization) or its degree of salience among key organizations within a related issue network, she suggests a third measurement: Wong believes that the number of state-sponsored economic sanctions justified in the name of the norm provides a useful additional alternative.

Following this in-depth discussion of salience measurement issues, Wong turns her attention to the independent variable – the organizational structure of successful NGOs. Here, she relies extensively on organization theory as developed in the business field, justifying its applicability due to the fact that academic studies have found very few differences in the behavior of non-profit NGOs and for-profit firms. But because organization theory does not deal extensively with the relationships of non-profit and for-profit actors seeking to achieve their respective ends within larger webs of interdependence, she also relies on insights derived from the rapidly growing field of network theory.

After carefully elucidating her dependent and independent variables, Wong turns to the empirics of her NGO case studies to illustrate how organizational structure affects salience. In Chapter 3, she takes an in-depth look at the classic “Goldilocks” case of Amnesty International where an artful balancing of centralized and decentralized structures and associated functions presumably led to an increase in both organizational and issue-related salience. Chapter 4 follows with a comparative examination of four other NGO cases showing how successful advocacy (and hence issue salience) increased when organizational conditions similar to those at AI were present. And the final case study chapter finds a similar policy lesson in the relative degrees of success and failure experienced by a variety of additional NGOs during six distinct human rights campaigns.

This book has several major strengths. The first is the contribution that it makes to identifying a new and potentially valuable way of measuring the political salience of a particular norm within a given issue domain – the willingness of states to impose economic sanctions on norm violators. We have already come a long way in this regard due to the work of scholars such as Beth Simmons who use the degree of international legalization, as well as that of others like Clifford Bob and Charli Carpenter who see salience as best measured by the centrality of and agenda-setting power of NGOs advocating for the norm within specific issue networks. Wong’s contribution to measuring salience is to show empirically how the “costly” state action of sanctioning can be used as an indicator of what norms states are really willing to stand up for at any given point in time.

Secondly, and most importantly, Wong asks us to open the “black box” of NGO organizational structure in order to determine whether variation at this micro-level might be used to explain political salience at both the broader advocacy network and state level. Borrowing from organization theory, she argues that this is indeed the case when NGO agenda-proposing and compliance functions are centralized and policy implementation is decentralized.

While Wong makes a strong case for the incorporation of an NGO organizational perspective into explanations for political saliency within the human rights norm domain, she is not quite as convincing when arguing that this perspective yields more explanatory power than some others currently prevalent in the field. This is especially true when it comes to her skepticism about salience being based on the intrinsic nature of the particular type of human rights norm garnering attention at any given point in time. For example, Keck and Sikkink’s discussion in Activists beyond Borders (1998) of why particular issue attributes of torture seized the public imagination during the late Cold War era of authoritarian dictatorships seems to yield a more compelling explanation for the salience of Amnesty International during that period than were any of its internal organizational characteristics.

Wong’s argument for an organizational explanation for salience could also have been strengthened by better case study selection and use of the comparative method. In this regard, the case of AI presents no problem except for the fact that it remained so closely identified with the issue of torture that its salience is difficult to control for. More problematic is her comparative case selection in Chapter 5 on “Using Campaigns to Examine Organizational and Ideational Salience.” Here, there are no clear selection criteria, large variations in the time frame during which an NGO’s organization structure and political salience are being measured, and too few negative cases (i.e., instances of organizationally driven failure).

In sum, Wendy Wong’s book makes a strong contribution to the academic debate as to where agency lies within the hierarchy of individual NGOs, transnational advocacy networks, and states that choose to raise the saliency of particular human rights issues. Her focus on the impact that the internal organizational characteristics of NGOs have on their effectiveness in this regard adds a dimension to this debate that has been largely lacking in the past. The challenge ahead is to find some way of more tightly integrating theories about the political saliency of human rights issues that emphasize agenda-setting by individual NGOs with others that focus on either key network “players” within given human rights issue domains or powerful states within the international system.