In its December 2023 filing to the International Court of Justice, South Africa accused Israel of violating its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention in a case that prompted strong reactions. Some touted the investigation as a significant step toward the fair application of international law. Others deemed it a cynical exercise, infused with double standards and political bias.
Amid the controversy, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that any ruling from the International Court of Justice is effectively unenforceable. The ICJ has no independent mechanism to ensure compliance. Israel could easily ignore any decision it dislikes, and the United States would almost certainly veto any attempt to coerce Israel through the UN Security Council.
But even without the material powers to enforce its judgments, the ICJ can still have a considerable effect by marshaling the moral powers of global condemnation. In this sense, it joins other forms of international rebuke in attempting to enforce human rights and humanitarian norms through shaming. International shaming, whether through formal legal mechanisms (such as the censure of the ICJ) or informal denunciations in diplomatic rhetoric, can hurt countries alleged to have violated international norms, embarrassing their leaders and tarnishing their reputations. It can also mobilize domestic opposition within the targeted countries, encouraging publics to demand change from their own leaders.
And yet, when it comes to Israel, the ICJ does not appear to be swaying Israeli leaders or citizens to implement a cease-fire or change the way Israel is fighting so that fewer Palestinian civilians will be killed. If anything, the investigation has only inflamed long-standing suspicions of international institutions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu captured the pique of Israeli public opinion when, in remarks in January, he pithily dismissed South Africa’s case as an act of “brazen gall”.
Israel is not unique in defying international pressure. Global shaming often fails to produce any meaningful change in the targeted country and, in some cases, can backfire by provoking outright resistance. For example, after Western countries condemned Uganda and Nigeria for criminalizing homosexuality in 2014, rights groups reported a spike in human rights violations against LGBTQ people in those two countries. In China, international shaming about human rights issues has sparked defensive nationalist backlashes among citizens, increasing support for the regime. Rulings by international courts have provoked similar “rally ’round the flag” responses in other countries, shifting public opinion and government policies in a counterproductive direction.
Shaming rarely works to convince rivals or adversaries to change their behavior because a targeted country has little to gain from acquiescing to the demands of its opponents. Governments understand this dynamic, and yet they insist on shaming others anyway. That is because the point of shaming is not just to try to change a state’s behavior but also to stake the moral high ground, earning credit with the public and winning the favor of other countries. In truth, shaming works to change behavior only in particular contexts, namely when friendly countries exert pressure on one another using existing leverage. But those states rarely want to throw their allies or partners under the bus and risk damaging valuable relationships. The irony of shaming is that it is used most often when it is almost destined to fail and not enough when it is most likely to succeed.
FOR SHAME
Shaming a state is much like shaming an individual: in both cases, shaming works to place social pressure on actors that violate shared norms. When world leaders denounced violence in Syria during its decade-long civil war, or when Gambia accused Myanmar of genocide in the ICJ in 2019, or when the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution in 2022 condemning human rights violations in Iran, the goal was to put a country in the spotlight, decry violations, and urge reform. Although these situations differed in important respects, all of these actions attempted to enforce widely accepted norms by applying some kind of social sanction.
Like shaming people, shaming governments is an inherently social process, occurring through preexisting relationships and risking damaging them. Even when it is purely rhetorical, criticizing other countries can endanger valuable ties. For example, many of China’s partners—including many Muslim countries—have refused to condemn its abuse of Uyghurs because they fear undermining a profitable relationship.
And yet leaders still try to shame other countries quite often, even when there appear to be few direct benefits of doing so. That’s because there are other benefits. By publicly shaming other countries for violating human rights, leaders can be rewarded by third-party audiences, such as their own voters, who genuinely believe in human rights and wish to see their government take action to protect them, or their allies, which want to see norms enforced on the world stage but may not want to bear that responsibility themselves. South African policymakers won tremendous domestic and international credit, for instance, by prosecuting Israel for genocide, reaping political gains at home while enhancing their country’s reputation abroad.
Shamers can benefit from stigmatizing a target. In the international realm, leaders often denounce human rights violations not because they genuinely care about human rights but because they want to inflict political damage on foreign adversaries, thus bolstering their own relative power. As a result, states shame their rivals in particularly sensationalist and inflammatory ways.
Compare, for example, Western reactions to human rights violations in Saudi Arabia and Iran. The two Middle Eastern countries are similar in many respects: both are run by authoritarian regimes, and both rank among the worst human rights violators. But they enjoy very different sorts of geopolitical ties. The United States and its Western allies routinely condemn Iran—an adversary—in the harshest terms. Many policymakers are rightly horrified by Iran’s record of abuse, but it is also clear that geopolitical motives underly their rhetoric. “Allies should be treated differently—and better—than adversaries”, wrote Brian Hook, a State Department aide in the Trump administration, in a 2017 memo. He elaborated that Washington should press China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia on human rights not only out of moral concern but also because doing so “is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically”.
Saudi Arabia and the United States have sustained a close partnership for nearly 80 years, cooperating on a variety of security, economic, and diplomatic issues. As a result, U.S. policymakers have hesitated to condemn the kingdom’s abysmal human rights record. When Saudi operatives killed the Saudi journalist (and U.S. resident) Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, the United States decided against denouncing or sanctioning Riyadh after the Saudis threatened to retaliate economically to any such measure. Even after the Biden administration released a report in 2021 that claimed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder, little changed. In the eyes of Washington, the cost of endangering an important relationship eclipsed the moral imperative of punishing Saudi violations.
The point here is not that Washington is guilty of hypocrisy—it is hardly unique in this regard—but that countries tend to shame their rivals and adversaries more often, and more harshly, than they do their friends and allies. It can be rational for leaders to continue to shame another country even if their efforts fail to reform the target’s behavior and even if those efforts backfire and exacerbate violations. Simply put, compliance is not always the primary goal of shaming.
SHAMELESS
Even when pressure is applied, it doesn’t always succeed in improving human rights conditions or deterring abuse. The shaming of adversaries is rarely effective. Because there is no valued relationship to protect, target countries have little reason to acquiesce to the shamer’s demands. Tehran, for example, takes U.S. criticism less seriously because it has no incentive to maintain good relations with Washington. Such accusations are also less credible; policymakers and the public see them as a cynical attempt to attack the target for political reasons, a perception that allows governments to safely reject and deny such accusations.
Shaming can even backfire by stimulating a defensive nationalist reaction in the target country. When domestic audiences perceive foreign pressure as hostile, paternalistic, or threatening, leaders can conclude that flouting that pressure will better serve their interests. In an earlier incident in Uganda, for example, Western condemnation of an anti-gay bill in 2009 provoked a defiant reaction from the public, transforming a local policy issue into a symbol of national sovereignty and self-determination. President Yoweri Museveni—who had reservations about the legislation—was backed into a corner. When he signed a different version of the bill in 2014, he did so, in the words of his spokesman, “with the full witness of the international media to demonstrate Uganda’s independence in the face of Western pressure and provocation”.
A similar reaction is evident in Israel, where a large portion of the public views the ICJ case as yet another iteration of unceasing international hostility toward the Jewish state. Such sentiments are not entirely unreasonable, considering that UN organs condemn Israel far more than any other country. Research has shown that even Israelis who are otherwise sympathetic to the Palestinian cause can find themselves supporting hard-line policies as part of a defensive reaction to international pressure. Such shifts in public opinion have bolstered the most hawkish segments of Israeli society while dampening internal calls for restraint.
Israel and its defenders have decried South Africa’s role as cynical and theatrical. But it is certainly true that South Africa chose to lead the case against Israel for reasons beyond shaming the Jewish state. In prosecuting the crime of genocide, South Africa has not only earned credit among those who wish to see Israel held accountable—a contingent that spans much of the world—but also among other countries in the global South that resent what they see as Western hypocrisy in the enforcement of global morality.
Sometimes, shaming really does change the behavior of targeted states. Human rights enforcement is more likely to succeed when countries pressure their friends and allies. When it comes to Israel, that responsibility falls squarely on the United States, which has the deepest alliance with Israel and thus the greatest leverage to help contain the destruction in Gaza.
But despite being the most effective kind of pressure, it is also the most difficult to pull off: leaders are reluctant to criticize friends and allies because they value these relationships and do not want to risk endangering them. For decades, the United States has shielded Israel from legitimate human rights criticism in large part because it views the alliance as critical to its security interests in the Middle East. “It’s not only a long-standing moral commitment”, then Vice President Joe Biden explained to an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in 2013. “It’s a strategic commitment”. Even as U.S. domestic opinion is gradually turning against Israel, Washington remains reluctant to use the leverage it has to constrain Israeli behavior.
THE STAKES OF SHAME
When it comes to human rights, adversaries are quick to condemn but often provoke a counterproductive response. Allies are the most effective enforcers but also the most reluctant to push friends to change their behavior. As a result, shaming is most common in situations where it is least likely to be effective and most effective in situations where it is least likely to occur.
Enforcing international norms requires political leverage; it demands that states harness their material and strategic influence for the benefit of innocent civilians in far-off places, which itself requires an enormous amount of political will. In this sense, U.S. policymakers can learn from another time in history when the United States was one of the last holdouts protecting an ally facing worldwide condemnation: apartheid-era South Africa. After decades of resistance, the United States finally yielded in 1986 to global and domestic pressure and issued sanctions against South Africa, despite Washington’s close economic and strategic partnership with the apartheid government. The sanctions helped speed the end of apartheid precisely because the United States had a strong relationship with the country it was targeting. If international pressure is to have any chance of curtailing the unfathomable suffering in Gaza and elsewhere, it will have to be led by the actors that have done the most to enable and protect the perpetrators.
This understanding should inform the United States’ approach to advancing human rights through foreign policy more generally. Governments are in a better position to influence states with which they share political or economic ties. When it comes to trying to change the behavior of adversaries, engagement—not isolation—offers the best chance for promoting human rights in the long term. As for partners, leaders will need to summon the political will required to overcome the costs of shaming a friend. In the service of protecting human rights, the United States must be willing to put strategic interests on the line.
Rochelle Terman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—And When It Backfires (Princeton University Press, 2023), from which this essay is adapted.