Does an international legal structure of treaties contribute to the improvement of human rights conditions in countries around the world? If so, what are the mechanisms driving compliance? In the past few years, scholars have taken opposing views on the role of human rights law that has emerged since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. While some see such treaties as essential tools for advancing human rights, skeptics view them as empty promises with no positive impact on actual rights practices. Those defending international law typically rely on in-depth case studies of human rights change in individual nations, whereas critics largely rely on quantitative analysis correlating a nation's ratification behavior with measurements of human rights records on the ground. Mobilizing for Human Rights not only overcomes this methodological divide but also offers a compelling claim that treaties do indeed improve human rights, primarily by setting the agendas of elites, encouraging legal action, and legitimizing the political mobilization of domestic activists. This positive effect is particularly pronounced in nations whose political systems are marked by a mix of autocratic and democratic practices.

Following the first part of the book, in which Beth A. Simmons develops the theoretical instruments related to international law, state commitment, and compliance, the main empirical chapters (5–8) cover a wide array of human rights issues, including civil rights (fair trails, religious freedom, torture, and the death penalty), equality of women (reproductive health, education, and employment), and the rights of the child (labor, immunizations, and child soldiers). Simmons does not claim that treaty commitment is the only, and certainly not the decisive, factor in explaining positive human rights change. What she shows is that broader external or internal structural changes of democratization or economic development fail to account for improvements and that domestic political agency is a necessary condition for advancing rights.

The book also effectively mobilizes comparisons across human rights issues to elaborate exactly how the domestic level plays a central role in making treaty commitments count. Comparing religious freedom and the right to a fair trial, Simmons shows that religious groups represent a stronger domestic constituency benefiting from ratification than do an “unsavory array of criminals” (p. 200). Here, her most puzzling case is the sustained movement toward a universal abolition of the death penalty, which in most nations is emerging against the expressed majority public opinion (p. 189). She solves this puzzle by de-emphasizing domestic mobilization and focusing primarily on the role of constitutional courts and the legal system. Using a comparison of Japan and Colombia, Simmons elaborates that a treaty commitment to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has varied effects across reproductive rights and employment. In Japan, the primary domestic mechanism was also a legal system used to challenge deep-seated “cultural mores” (p. 254), while in Colombia the same commitment led to broader domestic mobilization.

Simmons never fully exploits the potential of a more systematic qualitative analysis of the domestic processes for strengthening compliance. Despite the immense empirical and methodological depth and breadth of this study, the analysis avoids looking at cases where the logic of the main argument faces the greatest (and, theoretically, most profitable) challenges. While she frequently acknowledges in her case studies that positive changes are often barely noticeable and difficult to trace to treaty commitments, the study would have benefited from a case selection that included obvious outliers. Her emphasis is on nations that are neither solid democracies nor stable autocracies, but the refusal of the United States to sign CEDAW presents a missed opportunity to further explore the complexities of international–domestic interactions and the role of domestic groups opposed to the norms codified in global human rights agreements. As a result, the political agency of those opposed to international norms remains largely unacknowledged and certainly undertheorized. Simmons stops short of translating the many caveats regarding the possibility of treaty-driven human rights change into a more systematic analysis of the type of agency that typically stands against such efforts.

The larger point here is that the quantitative analysis clearly dominates, while the qualitative case studies largely serve as illustrations, rather than as equally compelling efforts to support the overall claims of this study. Case selection is an important part of this analysis, but giving more room to detailed case descriptions (as opposed to trying to cover more human rights issues) would give readers a better understanding of the mechanisms behind the transfer of international norms to the domestic level. To return to the case of CEDAW: A comparison between the United States and Japan would have produced more than an illustration of different pathways of domestic incorporation, but would possibly have allowed for the generation or testing of more systematic expectations concerning the relative importance of the different arenas of mobilization (elite discourses, the public, and the legal system). In the case of Japan, such an in-depth exploration would have paid greater attention to the government's overall goal of raising its profile in the United Nations and attaining a permanent seat in the Security Council. In the United States, exploring the reasons for not joining CEDAW provides fertile grounds for drawing on interest group and institutionalist accounts in order to develop more confident predictions about the relative importance of the different mechanisms across a diversity of nations. Not only would this have given the study a stronger footing in comparative politics, but it might also have created additional benefits for human rights activists who want to learn more about the kinds of strategies that are most likely to produce success in a given domestic environment.

Treaties and states are certainly central to human rights change, but Simmons's approach also largely forces her to ignore the increasing relevance of nonstate actors and the question of how to effectively protect rights in situations where governments lack even a basic capacity to live up to their international obligations. While governments may well be willing to increase the recruitment age for their military (pp. 339–40), today's more significant threat to children is rogue rebels whose behavior is not likely to be affected by international law. But even in her analysis on the role of transnational civil society groups, Simmons does not push for systematic claims linking the external to the domestic, let alone an agency that actually facilitates the diffusion of those norms in the first place (transnational nongovernmental organizations, a United Nations committee, etc.). Many transnational NGOs working in the humanitarian and development area have only recently adopted an explicit rights-based approach in their work and, thus, acknowledged the very assumptions of domestic governmental accountability underlying this study. And traditional advocacy by North-based human rights groups has put limited emphasis on local empowerment, relying primarily on “shaming” and external pressure.

With this impressive study, Simmons has certainly put to rest an academic debate about the relevance of human rights treaties; now we are back to studying the precise mechanisms most likely to promote sustainable human rights change. A treaty-based approach to human rights is important, but it is most successful when agents on the domestic and international level have developed a sophisticated understanding of how to effectively integrate rights language in their broader strategies of social and political change. The domestic mechanisms advancing compliance are not a given, but are themselves dependent on the resources and strategies available to domestic and external agents favoring (or resisting) an international norm. Given the recent strategic changes in the behavior of many transnational activists engaged in human rights issues, the effects that Simmons identifies as causal for the modest positive role of human rights treaties in the past should only become more relevant and powerful in the future.