I sat down to write this review in August, 2014. The Human Rights Council was agonizing over how to address abuses in Gaza. Islamic militants were overrunning towns in northwestern Iraq, beheading children as they went. Agents of the U.S. government were detaining and deporting thousands of refugee families fleeing political violence south of the border. Meantime, events in Ferguson, Missouri, put the spotlight on racist police brutality, the militarization of the domestic security sector, and the repression of nonviolent protest. Amnesty International took the unprecedented act, within U.S. borders, of deploying human rights investigators to Ferguson as witnesses. By late August, it was hard to feel as if human rights advocacy were making much of a difference a world racked by violence and repression even in powerful liberal democracies.

In the face of all this upheaval, I opened Jo Becker’s Campaigning for Justice with a sense of foreboding about human rights. I closed it with a renewed sense that human rights can make a difference. In its pages I read tale after tale of how practical, persistent, human rights advocacy has made and is making a difference in our turbulent, repressive world. Becker is a longtime practitioner at Human Rights Watch, who has led many of the campaigns she chronicles, so she has a horse in this race. But she also knows of what she speaks and so she backs up every story with facts, sources, and meticulous historical detail. The resulting book is, at its most basic, an antidote for cynicism and dispiritedness bred by media reporting of human rights failures.

Becker provides 11 case studies of human rights efforts, many of which have worked—but because her case studies are as often organized around themes as around campaigns, she describes far more than 11 distinct examples. She begins with norm-building efforts: the campaign to stop child recruitment and the campaign to protect domestic workers. From there she focuses on implementation architecture and agenda-setting processes: how campaigning by nongovernmental organizations prevented the election of human rights abusers to the new Human Rights Council; how the presence of United Nations Special Rapporteurs makes a difference in repressive situations; and how the concept of a global study was used to percolate “violence against children” onto the UN Secretariat’s agenda. Next, she focuses on enforcement, documenting campaigns for accountability for crimes in Sierra Leone, Libya, and Sri Lanka. And finally, she examines how new media are creating new kinds of advocacy networks, focusing on the “Genocide Olympics,” lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender rights campaigns in Jamaica and Nepal, and the issue of juvenile justice in the United States. Across these cases she highlights a range of tools and strategies that activists have used, often successfully, while documenting challenges and barriers, and deriving a set of key principles for doing advocacy.

For educators, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence with which to work here. Students of human rights advocacy need success stories to insulate them from the nihilism of everyday headlines. They need to think about what has worked and why and how it might be applied to new problems. They need to understand the nuts and bolts of human rights advocacy in order to seek jobs in the field—something often missing in stale social-scientific treatments. They also need cases and narrative examples with which to understand the kind of broad historical patterns laid out in the graphs and charts of an increasingly quantitative human rights scholarship. The book is chock full not only of stories but also of profiles of victims and of activists: stories of real people that leave the reader with a sense of hope and inspiration.

For analysts, Becker offers descriptive data to buttress or challenge theories of human rights advocacy and how it works—data undisciplined by the need to fit a specific theoretical framework but which can, and likely will, be drawn on to service emerging research. Her narrative descriptions of case studies on Charles Taylor, child soldiering, and the Beijing Olympics will likely be referenced and coded in the medium-n data sets of future scholars of campaigns. This type of narrative approach to specific successes also fleshes out what large-n studies cannot help but occlude in their quest for broad patterns—the practical politics of saving lives on the margins, all of which adds up incrementally (Becker shows) to significant advances in human rights in specific contexts—even if the overall performance of states remains relatively dismal.

Campaigning for Justice will leave questions in the minds of more analytically minded or theoretically driven readers. What accounts for variation in the success of human rights efforts? Why do similar campaigns work in some areas and not others? Becker does not organize the book around efforts to answer these kinds of questions. She does pair cases in such a way as to explore this variation, and acknowledges that sometimes government interests are too powerful, but no comprehensive new theory is offered as to when the balance of power favors human rights activists, or how in some cases they can reconstitute government interests. Implicit in many of the cases is that NGO campaigns make a bigger difference than individual NGO advocacy: Cases in which NGOs manage effective coalitions (as in defeating the election of Belarus to the Human Rights Council) are more successful than when NGOs are split or in contestation (as in the case of Cuba, which was reelected). Becker discusses the need for “broad-based alliances” as key among her cross-cutting “lessons learned,” and she highlights the power of specific types of alliances—with “unlikely leaders” for example, with claimants, and with transnational moral authorities like Desmond Tutu. But she does not delve deeply into what determines variation in the strength of NGO coalitions or their ability to attract these types of allies. These are key questions for many scholars of human rights: Political scientists expecting advances in theories of the way in which human rights can work or how advocates choose among strategies and objectives may leave wanting more.

These are not Becker’s questions, however. She does not seek or claim to reinvent or even deploy the wheel chiseled by previous generations of human rights scholarship, or offer rigorous theory-driven prescriptions for building a human rights culture. Instead, she offers deep description from a viewpoint on the front lines, corroborated through painstaking interviews and sourcing, of what it is that human rights activists do in practical terms—and how these actions sometimes (not always, but often enough to fill a book) lead to victories. The story she tells is one of tremendous diversity and heterogeneity in the human rights movement. Beyond a few key lessons about the importance of broad-based coalitions, good messaging, and involving those most affected, Becker’s point is precisely that there are many appropriate strategies and no one formula for success: “human rights advocacy is an art, not a science.” The great contribution of is not in its analytic insights but, rather, its rich descriptive data. Drawing on this, future analysts will refine their theories. But more importantly, future activists will derive lessons learned, ways forward, and inspiration that theirs is not a lost cause.