This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of international “naming and shaming”: a ubiquitous tactic used by states and civil society to improve international human rights. When does international shaming lead to the improvement in human rights conditions, and when does it backfire, resulting in the worsening of human rights practices or a backlash against international norms? Instead of understanding transnational norms as emanating from some monolithic “international community,” I propose that we gain better analytic insight by considering the ways in which norms are embodied in particular actors and identities, promoted and contested between specific states in relational terms.

Starting from this approach, I apply insights from sociology, social psychology, and criminology to develop a theory of international “defiance,” or the increase in norm offending behavior caused by a proud, shameless reaction against a sanctioning agent. As detailed in Chapter 2, defiance unfolds through domestic and international logics that incentivize elites to violate international norms for political gain. Anticipating these political effects, regimes often provoke and manipulate shaming for strategic purposes. In the long-term, defiance can attach oppositional norms to collective identity, transforming domestic and international normative orders. I argue that international pressure is more likely to provoke defiance under three conditions: (1) the target has weak social ties with the shamer (e.g. economic, political, or ideological); (2) the shamer lacks credibility due to bias or inaccuracy; and (3) the shame is stigmatizing, denigrating the actor instead of the behavior.

Existing empirical studies on “naming and shaming” tend to focus exclusively on the country being shamed, obscuring the relational dynamics at the core of the shaming process. My empirical work, in contrast, explores these relationships head-on. In Chapter 3, I evaluate the role of social ties (the first condition driving defiance) in both the causes and consequences of interstate shaming using novel data from the Universal Periodic Review, a process conducted by the United Nations wherein states “peer review” one another’s human rights practices. I show that not only is shaming driven by the relationship between sender and target, but states will accept or defy shaming based on this relationship, regardless of the norm in question. In other words, when it comes to human rights shaming, the critic matters just as much as the criticism.

Chapter 4 shines the spotlight on the shamer, exposing the political biases that shape human rights reporting. I argue that if human rights reporting is stigmatizing, it can risk defiance and backlash. How can one measure and compare stigma in media portrayals in a systematic way? I propose a solution using new data on U.S. news coverage of global women’s rights, 1980-2014 along with novel computational text analysis tools. Chapter 4 presents evidence suggesting that American media stigmatizes Muslims in their coverage of women’s rights abroad by propagating the stereotype that Muslims are uniquely or particularly discriminatory against women.

While I cannot address the impact of such coverage writ large, I follow up on one particular story that captured widespread media attention in 2010-11: the “Save Sakineh” campaign, which involved a massive, global shaming operation directed at Iran for sentencing a woman to stoning for adultery of 2010-11. Chapters 5 and 6 conduct an in-depth qualitative study of the case, leveraging in-depth interviews and extensive archival research to trace the micro-politics of defiance. I illustrate the role of social ties, credibility, and stigma in the development of the campaign, as well as the co-constitutive relationship between Western shaming and Iranian defiance. Chapter 7 concludes by sketching some additional implications of my argument, directions for future research, and policy recommendations.

Why are religious civil wars so difficult to resolve peacefully? This dissertation argues that states, not just insurgents, drive the intractability of religious conflicts. More specifically, it draws on insights from social psychology, along with religious and strategic studies, to develop and test a novel theoretical framework for why and when government officials refuse to compromise with opposition movements that mobilize along religious lines.

The argument posits that Western political and military elites share a secular strategic culture that heightens the correspondence between religious insurgents’ behavior and motives. This cognitive bias leads decision makers to infer that religious guerrillas fight to radically alter the status quo, rather than protest unfavorable conditions, such as poverty or territorial occupation. It is most influential when religious demands represent a central incompatibility in the conflict and counterinsurgents face an unfamiliar faith tradition. Ultimately, government officials discount the efficacy of a negotiated settlement because they conclude their opponents will stop at nothing to achieve their objective. It is not that religious insurgents are necessarily unwilling to make concessions; it is that they cannot credibly do so.

These claims are tested with comparative evidence from British counterinsurgency campaigns during the early postwar period with an emphasis on Mandatory Palestine, Cyprus, and Kenya. The dissertation draws on original data collected from more than a half dozen archives in Great Britain, Cyprus, and Israel. This includes documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and housed at The National Archives of the United Kingdom that have only been available to the public since 2013. For each case, process tracing is employed to show as explicitly as possible the link between British decision-makers general beliefs about religion and their strategic preferences over the course of the conflict.

The dissertation’s argument and findings challenge the influential notion that dissidents’ spiritual beliefs alone drive civil wars to endure longer and remain resistant to bargained solutions. In addition, they promise to augment the study of religious conflict by establishing a research agenda on the role of state forces in such engagements.

How does religion shape transnational norms and the ways in which they are contested or adopted? Although constructivist international relations theory has made significant strides in understanding the role of norms in shaping political outcomes, there has been little research into how religion affects norm dynamics. This dissertation seeks to address this gap by developing a theory of "religious norms", which I define as standards of proper behavior that arise from actors' religious beliefs. I argue that while religious norms bear many similarities to secular norms, they differ in that believers understand them to emanate from the highest authority of all, that of the sacred. This can lead religious adherents to treat religious norms as having overriding importance, especially when they perceive them to be under attack from competing norms. When this happens, religious adherents can frame the religious norm as highly salient, constitutive of the faith and under threat, a process that I call "defensive sacralization". Defensive sacralization seeks to mobilize believers in opposition to competing norms and to preserve the integrity of religious norms. At the same time, it can stifle theological debate, harden the boundaries of the faith, and raise the costs of accommodating competing norms, leading to increased polarization through a "ratcheting" effect that I call the "sacralization trap".

I study the nature of religious norms, defensive sacralization and the sacralization trap by attempting to explain why the Philippines, which has signed international legal documents affirming reproductive health (including access to contraception) as a human right, has repeatedly failed to pass legislation that would implement these international obligations. I argue that this failure can be attributed to two main factors: first, the domestic political power of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, which enables it to wield an informal veto in issue areas relating to sexual morality; and second, the Church's defensive sacralization of its teachings against contraception, which it perceives to be under threat from transnational reproductive health norms. Through field interviews in the Philippines with activists, theologians, clergy, government officials and scholars, I show how defensive sacralization has sidelined Catholic theologians who believe that the Church may legitimately accommodate the Philippine state's adoption of a national reproductive health policy. By drawing on the history of the Catholic Church's moral theology on contraception and its response to reproductive health norms at major international conferences, I demonstrate how the Church's defensive sacralization in the Philippines is rooted in a broader transnational normative struggle even as it is conditioned by the Philippines' unique local sociopolitical environment.

More broadly, religious norms, defensive sacralization and the sacralization trap provide a new conceptual vocabulary to describe some of the distinctive ways in which religion shapes political processes and outcomes. By apply constructivist international relations theory to the study of religion in politics, this dissertation seeks to begin building a conceptual bridge between the two disciplines.

Why do armed groups uproot civilians in wartime? This dissertation identifies variation across civil wars in three population displacement strategies - cleansing, depopulation, and forced relocation - and tests different explanations for their use. I develop a new "assortative" theory of displacement, which argues that while some strategies (cleansing) aim to expel undesirable or disloyal populations, others (forced relocation, and perhaps depopulation) seek to identify the undesirables or the disloyal in the first place. When combatants lack information about opponents' identities and civilians' loyalties, they can use human mobility to infer wartime sympathies through "guilt by location." Triggering displacement forces people to send costly and visible signals of loyalty based on whether, and where, they flee. This makes communities more "legible," enabling combatants to use people's movements as a continuous indicator of affiliation and allegiance; and to extract rents and recruits from the population. I therefore show that in some cases, displacement is attractive because it offers unique solutions to information and resource problems in civil wars by acting as a sorting mechanism and a force multiplier.

To evaluate my theory, I adopt a multi-method, multi-level research design that focuses on displacement by state actors, the primary perpetrators of these methods. I introduce a new dataset of population displacement strategies in 160 civil wars (1945-2008), disaggregated by type, and conduct a series of quantitative tests. The data show that strategic displacement has been much more common in wartime than previously thought. I also find that, consistent with my expectations, different displacement strategies occur in different contexts and appear to follow different logics. Cleansing is more likely in conventional wars, where territorial conquest takes primacy, and when counterinsurgents have access to group-level identifiers that link civilians to an armed group. Forced relocation - the most common displacement strategy - is more likely in irregular wars, where identification problems are most acute, and when counterinsurgents lack access to other group-level heuristics for inferring civilian loyalties. The evidence indicates that cleansing follows a logic of punishment. The results for relocation, however, are consistent with the implications of my assortative logic: it is more likely to be employed by resource-constrained incumbents fighting insurgencies in "illegible" areas - rural, peripheral territories - and it correlates strongly with state efforts to mobilize the population into civilian defense forces.

While the cross-national analysis lends indirect support for my arguments, a series of case studies provide direct evidence for the assortative logic. Two in-depth case studies, of civil wars in Uganda and Syria, are based on extensive field research conducted between 2016 and 2019, including hundreds of interviews with perpetrators and victims of displacement. An additional chapter features three shorter case studies of conflicts in Burundi, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

As the most comprehensive study of strategic wartime displacement to date, this dissertation challenges some core assumptions about a devastating feature of modern conflict and an increasingly salient issue in world politics. My findings have important implications for research on forced displacement, civil war, and political violence, and can inform policy efforts to prevent, mitigate, and better respond to wartime migrations and their myriad consequences.

This theory-building dissertation investigates how states' narratives about dark pasts are shaped and contested over time, employing macro-historical analysis to trace the trajectories over the past several decades of Turkey's narrative of the Armenian Genocide and Japan's narrative of the Nanjing Massacre.

In a time of unprecedented access to information and increased scrutiny of how the past is represented, how are some states able to maintain national narratives that are at odds with widely accepted versions of the underlying historical events? Why do some states attempt to come to terms with the past perpetration of genocide or mass killing, while others deny wrongdoing for decades? Despite dramatic increases in truth-telling, truth-seeking and state apologies for historic wrongs, there remains both a great deal of variation in how states deal with their own dark pasts and insufficient understanding of the sources of this variation. Given that narratives about past atrocities can increase threat perception between states, can be used by leaders to justify war to domestic audiences, and can create tensions and prejudices that contribute to future conflicts, there are compelling reasons to investigate the dynamics underlying this variation.

The core question answered in this dissertation is: What are the sources of change and continuity in states' narratives of past crimes? Existing research tells us that domestic regime change, transnational activism and shifts in international alliances can bring about changes in states' narratives of dark pasts. Offering an integrating framework that incorporates the domestic and international spheres, I argue that while international pressures can increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, domestic actors largely determine the content of such change. Moreover, in contrast to observers who have warned that progressive changes in states' narratives threaten a backlash from the right, I argue that actors across the political spectrum contest and shape narratives of the past. My findings are based on more than eight months of fieldwork, including archival research in Turkey, and over seventy-five elite interviews conducted in Turkey, Japan and the United States.

Building on comparative research on institutional change and feedback effects, this research contributes to literature on the impact of international norms, institutions and law on states' behavior, to scholarship on the politics of memory and transitional justice, and to work at the intersection of Turkish studies and genocide studies. My research will also help policymakers better deal with controversies over the past, by revealing the sources of change and continuity in narratives of the past and the longer-term dynamics set off by pressures on and changes in official narratives.