No dedicated scholar of human rights impact can afford to be without the two books under review here, both of which represent significant contributions to the field of human rights research. They encapsulate 20 years of thinking about the difference, if any, made to human rights outcomes by an extensive array of international human rights norms, laws, organizations, and policies.

The Persistent Power of Human Rights is an edited collection intended to assess the durability of 1999’s seminal The Power of Human Rights, in which the “spiral model” of human rights impact was fully laid out for the first time. Persistent Power is impressive as a scholarly retrospective, not least because it so persuasively critiques the spiral model itself (in excellent chapters by Anja Jetschke and Andrea Liese, and Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks). Moreover, the “scope conditions” needed to save the model, outlined in the introduction of Persistent Power by Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp, are a welcome step beyond laws and norms (and the spiral model) into the world of concrete political realities.

The ineffectiveness of international human rights laws and institutions has been a mainstay of Emilie M. Hafner-Burton’s previous work, her influential critique of conventional advocacy strategies centering on the failure to adequately address the role of power. Her Making Human Rights a Reality is a systematic attempt to argue that law and power must (and can) be made to work together by signing up what she calls “steward states,” the United States and the European Union, for the task. By clubbing together, being smarter about how they apply human rights pressure, and by choosing which issues to prioritize, these stewards can, Hafner-Burton claims, achieve the kind of human rights gains that she argues have yet to materialize. This argument follows important earlier chapters that try to explain, among other things, why states commit human rights abuses.

Despite these achievements, both books inevitably raise many questions. Their highly specialized focus runs the risk of not seeing the forest for the trees in terms of what is happening in the wider human rights world. There is too little analysis of changes under way at the level of the international system as a whole, for example. In addition, because neither book starts with a declaration of theoretical intent—each at times puts forward arguments that we would broadly identify as realist, liberal, and constructivist—the question of why states do what they do, including why they (and other actors) might resist human rights on principle, remains largely unaddressed. The constructivist inspiration for The Power of Human Rights was bold, relying as it did on the claim that states could be persuaded by the power of international norms not only to behave differently but also to be different. The aspirations of Persistent Power are notably less ambitious: the logic of consequences takes place against a background of a logic of appropriateness. Given the dearth of evidence of deep structural change in the nature of state identities, this means that the logic of consequences remains where the action is. While this is an issue for Persistent Power, and any lingering hope for the spiral model, Hafner-Burton has always been less persuaded by the logic of appropriateness. Yet her account would also have benefited from more theorizing about how and why states act as they do. Why is law, enforced now by steward states pursuing their national interests (a problem anyway for the multinational EU), still the answer in a world where material power is what matters? How can a legal system tolerate its most powerful members elevating themselves above the rules? And how can such exceptions avoid undermining completely the credibility of steward states when they claim to be good global citizens?

Both books are fundamentally concerned with the question of compliance: Does all the human rights law, advocacy, courts, policy, aid, and trade conditionality with which we are familiar actually improve the behavior of states? Persistent Power asks the same question of multinationals and non-state actors. Both books agree that the right answer is yes, but in the places that need it least. Human rights advocacy strategies work well in liberal democracies and poorly in hard cases. The spiral model’s hope was that all states would eventually pass through five stages of human rights improvement: denial, repression, tactical concessions, prescriptive status and rule-consistent behavior. As several authors in the edited volume point out, human rights progress has got stuck at level three, the “bottleneck” of tactical concessions. Levels four and five, which require accepting a norm’s validity and abiding by it in a habitual way, have proven elusive.

Persistent Power identifies reasons why this is so, including that many willing states cannot diffuse human rights practice because they lack centralized administrative capacity and/or authority, and that among unwilling governments some are more vulnerable to pressure than others. The upshot is that the journey to tactical concessions (agreeing to the law) is, relatively speaking, the easy part because at that point no core social, cultural or political norms have yet been changed. Risse and Kathryn Sikkink concede (pp. 284–85) that behavioral conformity, rather than attitudinal change, may be all that is needed to talk of compliance. But this is not only a move away from the “habituation” required in stage five of The Power of Human Rights, it reverses stages four and five. Rule-consistent behavior, not deep socialization, is now sufficient. Perhaps in reality there are only four stages: The old stage four, prescriptive status, drops out except for politically liberal states for whom it is already constitutive and embedded. Or perhaps the model splits after stage three, yielding two alternative trajectories of normative development that may never intersect—either prescriptive status or rule-consistent behavior, but not both.

Commitment, let alone compliance, remains contested, in other words (as shown by Sikkink’s chapter on the United States and Katrin Kinzelbach’s on China). Once a state gets to “rule-consistent behavior” (one version of stage four on my view), this looks a lot like perpetual tactical concession and is no proof against recidivism. In the 1999 volume, said Risse and Sikkink on page 29, a key sign of prescriptive status was that governments “acknowledge the validity of the human rights norms.” Even the United States subverted international norms in the 2000s (torture, the International Criminal Court, rendition) and continues to do so (Guantanamo, drones). The list of other states contesting core human rights norms, with Russia and China prominent, is a long one. The explanation for this lies partly in the scope conditions—indicative as they are of broader political, cultural and economic developments well beyond human rights—and partly in shifting global power dynamics. Mobilizing local capacity is one of Persistent Power’s strategies to cope with weak compliance, but the promise of that mobilization is heavily dependent on the direction in which broader, far more powerful social forces are moving.

In Making Human Rights a Reality, Hafner-Burton’s argument begins with power, claiming from the start that without it laws are unlikely ever to be effective at generating normative change. The author reduces international socialization mechanisms to two—persuasion and coercion (pp. 63–65). Incentives are fashioned as rewards (pp. 146–50) and come under the coercion label (as positive and negative incentives). What makes persuasion and coercion effective is the power of the so-called steward states that stand behind them. These like-minded states must be encouraged, she argues, to use threats and rewards to cajole noncompliant states into abiding by human rights law. Given, in Hafner-Burton’s view, that steward states are already “the main engines for the expansion of the international human rights legal system” (p. 136), what matters is getting them to be strategically savvier. This means abandoning, in the short term at least, the hope that all states can be made to behave better (a spiral model aspiration) and that all human rights can be pursued simultaneously (a core principle for global human rights advocates). It also means being smart about legitimation by using local nongovernmental organizations and national human rights institutes to foster compliance, thereby avoiding (it is hoped) the appearance of meddling Western-led intervention.

As Hafner-Burton acknowledges, however, the key “steward state,” the United States, regularly flouts human rights norms and laws. Alongside the EU, both are frequently labeled as self-serving hypocrites by other states and often lack credibility as a result. She is clear that these steward states will not promote human rights unless they think it is in their self-interest to do so. Steward states must therefore have either internalized human rights norms already (seeing them as tied up with their national interests) or be considered uniquely exempt from accountability according to those norms. But where does this leave the global human rights regime comprised by international NGOs, international courts, United Nations institutions, and legal conventions? How can advocates hope to sustain global law on the basis of structural exceptions for the most powerful states? If the only way to provoke principled action from steward states is by appealing to a logic of consequences, then human rights are really just another foreign policy tool for Western states—a sometimes cost-effective way of getting allies and enemies to fall in line. This may be a realistic way to effect change, but the result can hardly be said to be a global human rights regime. More likely it will lead to evasion, backlash, and selectivity (in fact, the status quo). When Making Human Rights a Reality deals with prioritization, it treats steward states as analogous to neutral medical professionals doing triage by making “assessments of which actions yield the most impact for human rights” (p. 180). But in such a scenario, surely international human rights lawyers are the only plausible candidates for neutrality? Steward states self-evidently play favorites with their patients. Leaving it to them to decide what is best for human rights absent any meaningful normative oversight is to abandon any hope at all that human rights law might be an effective brake on state power.

While both of these books are stimulating and important interventions in the debate over human rights impact, neither addresses how changes under way in the global distribution of power might affect human rights impact. What if the West in general, and the United States in particular, really is in relative decline? The whole debate about compliance has a pre-9/11, pre-BRICs, post–Cold War liberal feel to it. Is the EU (assuming it survives) really likely to remain a strong global political force? Where are Russia and China and Iran and Saudi Arabia as potential challengers to global human rights norms? Or where are India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, and Nigeria as states that will want more of a say in global affairs? Where is the pushback in Kenya, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, and Turkey? What about ambivalence and even principled resistance—from states, religious actors, nationalists—to core aspects of the global human rights regime? There is no discussion of economic and social rights, which are increasingly central to the wider global human rights agenda. Perhaps the next 20 years will look a lot like the last 20. But the possibility that liberal hegemony is waning, and the implications that might have for human rights, is surely worth examining too.