Forced to Be Good: Why Trade Agreements Boost Human Rights, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 232 pp., $40 cloth.

With this book Emilie Hafner-Burton upends our thinking about how social justice norms find their way into international regulations. She is struck by the “regulatory shift” of recent years, which has seen human rights regulations find their way into both U.S. and European agreements with their trading partners—what would have been an outlandish move mere decades ago. The 2004 U.S. free trade agreement with Singapore, for instance, obliges both parties to “strive to ensure” that the rights of workers and children are protected under domestic law, and establishes a joint committee to oversee the implementation of this social-justice-enhancing commitment.

Hafner-Burton's analysis aims to steal our eyes from the more conventional explanations of such developments—among them the notion that moral entrepreneurs, such as NGOs and activist citizens, have played the key, causal role in changing the face of global trade regulation. Rather than analyze only the changing preferences of policy-makers and the ethical actors that have been credited with influencing them, Forced to Be Good emphasizes the role of domestic political bargaining. While allowing that “interest-based motivations” can “benefit from morally persuasive overtones,” and, moreover, that the inclusion of rights standards in trade agreements has at least led to important if modest improvements in human rights, the take-home message is that policy-makers “use” human rights to compete for political influence over trade policy.