States in the Global South have historically been among the strongest defenders and greatest beneficiaries of strict norms of sovereignty and non-interference. Yet, in the 1970s and 1980s, states in Latin America and Africa began to compromise on the norm of non-interference by delegating authority to enforce human rights to their own regional organizations. What explains this behavior? Why did this change occur unevenly across regions, with states in the Middle East and Southeast Asia continuing to uphold the norm of non-interference?
I argue that states delegated this authority in response to challenges to their self-determination, or their ability to domestically affirm the decision to accept international rules and to meaningfully participate in their implementation. In the 1970s, Western governments began to enforce human rights by incorporating them into their economic relations with developing states. These new enforcement measures challenged the self-determination of states that were subject to them, creating a new set of human rights policies that were presented as a fait accompli and were implemented in contexts in which they were unable to exercise influence.
For states on the receiving end of these policies, the question was no longer whether human rights would be enforced, but who would enforce them and how. They responded by trading sovereignty for self-determination—creating, accepting, and expanding human rights enforcement mechanisms and arguing for the authority of their own regional organizations. By doing so, long-time dictatorships and states that genuinely supported human rights cooperated in an attempt to establish an alternative enforcement authority over human rights, one in which they could exercise greater voice and influence. In this way, delegation was a form of subtle resistance. Regionalism provided a way for weaker states to exercise agency, mitigate the effects of international hierarchy, and increase their voice and influence over global governance.
These changes occurred unevenly because the policies were applied unevenly. Western states tended to pursue them in regions where doing so was relatively cheap and easy, while subsuming human rights to other issues in regions where they had other countervailing foreign policy goals. As a result, in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, states did not experience the same pressures, and as a result, they maintained their previous stance on non-interference.