the boomerang market supply, demand and the geography of...
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The Boomerang Market: Supply, Demand and the Geography of Human Rights
Media Coverage
Emilie M. Hafner-Burton
Assistant Professor, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs and Department of Political Science
James Ron
Associate Professor, Carleton University, Norman Paterson School of International
Affairs
June 3, 2009 version
Abstract length: 234 words
Article length: 13,442 words
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Abstract:
In response to human rights abuses, local activists “throw” information boomerangs into
the transnational sphere through written reports, emails, phone calls, protests and study
tours. Then, transnational activists accelerate the boomerang through its repackaging,
dissemination, and targeted delivery to key journalists and opinion leaders. Eventually,
these forces may cumulatively push Western governments and IGOs to “pitch” the
boomerang back to the originating country through diplomatic pressures for reform.
Human rights boomerangs are launched from every continent and world region, but are
local activists in all places equally capable of success? Our answer, in short, is no. We
use a three-stage research design combining quantitative and qualitative techniques to
analyze the experiences of nearly 150 countries from 1980 to 2000. We find (1) that the
Western media was more likely to catch boomerangs from countries where abuses are
more severe, local activists are more numerous and media savvy, and where transnational
activists are heavily involved; but (2) that Latin America’s boomerangs received special
media attention since the beginning of the global market for human rights boomerangs in
the 1970s and 80s, while equally compelling boomerangs from other countries were
ignored or underpublicized. This “Latin American advantage” stems from an early lead in
boomerang supply and demand that was later bolstered through path dependent
mechanisms. As pioneers in the global market for human rights boomerangs, Latin
American countries secured first mover advantages that endured throughout the 1990s.
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I. Introduction:
Contemporary IR scholars have shown that local activists concerned by government
repression in their countries can try to better their conditions by attracting the attention of
transnational and international actors.1 Unable to effectively protest at home, local
human rights defenders can send information abroad to journalists, activist networks,
non-governmental or international governmental organizations (NGOs and IGOs),
religious institutions, and informal Diaspora groups. These can amplify and distribute the
information, pushing Western liberal governments and multilateral bodies to pressure
offending governments.
Scholars term this the “boomerang effect”2 because of the process’ circular
nature. First, local activists “throw” information boomerangs into the transnational sphere
through written reports, emails, phone calls, protests and study tours. Then, transnational
activists accelerate the boomerang through its repackaging, dissemination, and targeted
delivery to key journalists and opinion leaders. Eventually, these forces may
cumulatively push Western governments and IGOs to “pitch” the boomerang back to the
originating country through diplomatic pressure, official scrutiny, aid conditionality and -
in some cases – sanctions. Although the Western media is only one player in the broader
boomerang process, it is often vital to ultimate boomerang success.
Country boomerang examples abound, including Argentina during the “dirty
war”,3 Chile under Pinochet,4 the former Soviet Bloc during the Helsinki thaw,5 South
1 Brysk 1994; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999; Khagram 2004; Bob 2005; Hafner-Burton and Tustui 2005; Cole 2006; Franklin 2008; Hafner-Burton 2005, 2008, 2009. 2 Keck and Sikkink 1998. 3 Brysk 1994; Sikkink 2008.
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Africa under apartheid,6 and Palestinian territories under Israeli rule.7 From these and
other places, transnational activists and the Western mass media have caught - and
Western governments have pitched back - boomerangs thrown by local activists.
Many local civil society actors have earned global reputations through
boomerangs, including Argentina’s Mothers (and Grandmothers) of the Plaza de Mayo,
Mexico’s Zapatistas, and the global Women in Black network. Even more common are
boomerangs that forge individual reputations, including those of Vaclav Havel, the Dalai
Lama, Rigoberta Menchú, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Jacobo Timerman.
Human rights boomerangs are launched from every continent and world region,
but are local activists in all places equally capable of success? Do equally powerful
boomerangs about similar issues attract the same attention when thrown from diverse
locales?
Our answer, in short, is no, and our analysis reveals important fissures in the
existing scholarship. Whereas most IR studies of transnational activism focus on the
“supply” side of the process – the throwing of boomerangs by local civil society and their
dissemination by transnational activists – they largely ignore the politics of “demand” in
boomerang-catching countries.8 As a result, the existing literature does not fully explain
how Western politics shapes Western media receptivity to foreign activist protest. It also
does not recognize how path dependency within the boomerang process itself can lock in
4 Sikkink 2004. 5 Thomas 2001. 6 Klotz 1999. 7 Ron 2003. 8 Many scholars, by contrast, have analyzed the importance of political conditions in boomerang-sending countries.
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advantages for early boomerang suppliers, and restrict opportunities for boomerang
latecomers.
Instead, the relevant IR scholarship assumes that human rights issues and
processes of boomerang supply, drives the entire processes. The Western media, in this
view, focuses more on intense abuses and/or issues that attract substantial interest from
transnational activists. Although we believe these assumptions to be true, they tell only
one part of the story. Geographic place also matters substantially, and so does order-of-
entry into the global boomerang “market”. Although communications scholars have long
demonstrated world-geographic inequalities in general Western media coverage,9 most IR
scholars of transnational activism have not taken these findings into consideration.
We thus both agree and disagree with the conventional wisdom. Contemporary
views are correct, we believe, because the Western media is in fact more likely to catch
boomerangs from countries where abuses are more severe, local activists are more
numerous and media savvy, and where transnational activists are heavily involved.
The conventional wisdom is also wrong, we claim, because geographic location,
U.S. foreign policy interests and order-of-entry matter. Specifically, Latin America’s
boomerangs received special media attention since the beginning of the global market for
human rights boomerangs in the 1970s. In the early years, the region’s local human rights
activists enjoyed advantages in both supply and demand, while in later years, they
continued to attract Western media attention because of path dependent processes. By
neglecting these factors, the relevant IR scholarship has incorrectly specified the
constraints and opportunities facing human rights promoters worldwide. And, most
9 Weaver, Porter and Evans’ 1984; Chang, Pollick and Lee 1992; Park 1999; Golan 2008.
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importantly, it has mistakenly applied the lessons of one specific geographic locale to the
rest of the world.
2. The Global Human Rights Boomerang Market
We conceive of relations between local boomerang throwers and Western media catchers
as one of supply and demand, building on the political-economic turn in transnational
activist and NGO studies.10 Local activists such as Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo supply boomerangs to Western newspapers such as the New York Times.
Transnational activists such as Amnesty International or elements of the Catholic Church
serve as market intermediaries, helping suppliers identify and reach Western consumers,
informing buyers about pertinent and reliable products, and conveying information to all
sides about shifts in demand, supply, and consumer tastes.11
A prototypical example of the boomerang process in action appears in Danner’s12
account of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. In that incident, elite Salvadoran
troops - some of whom were U.S. - trained - killed hundreds of civilians while pursuing
guerrillas in a contested rural area. Word of the massacre seeped out from local activists,
guerrillas, and Church members, and the information was soon transmitted to U.S. -
based activists and journalists through transnational Church-activist channels. The New
York Times and Washington Post sent investigative reporters, and the massacre was
eventually described in detail in these and other media sources, becoming a topic of
intense public debate.
10 Cooley and Ron 2002; Sell and Prakash 2004; Bob 2005; Simeant 2005; Berkovitch and Gordon 2008. 11 This is a modified version of the model sketched out by Bob (2005). 12 Danner 1994.
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In this case, the ready “supply” of local boomerangs was facilitated by the
intensity of the human rights violation, coupled with El Salvador’s pool of experienced
and skilled activists. Despite the brutality of the civil war, there was some measure of
free speech in the country, giving local activists the ability to receive and transmit
information. Skilled and impassioned transnational intermediaries then amplified and
disseminated the boomerang to key American figures, and leading journalists then caught
or “purchased” the boomerang because of the clear link to ongoing U.S. policy debates.
El Salvador’s government was a U.S. client and ally in the Reagan Administration’s war
on communism, and responsibility for its abuses was often debated amongst American
activist and policy circles. Soon after receiving the boomerang, American reporters
realized that a story of this magnitude would be of substantial public interest, and thus
worth devoting attention.
The El Mozote massacre occurred only a few years after the market for human
rights boomerangs first emerged.13 Like El Salvador’s human rights defenders, other
activists across Latin America entered the global market with several key advantages. On
the supply side, they had been the first to benefit in the mid-1970s from what later
became a global wave of local human rights organizing.14 In the 1980s, they became
pioneers in what later became a global “justice cascade” of post-authoritarian and post-
conflict justice-seeking.15 Cumulatively, these factors boosted the number, experience,
and global connections of Latin American activists, giving them an early advantage.
13 Keck and Sikkink 1998; Sikkink 2008. 14 Ball 2000. 15 Lutz and Sikkink 2001; Sikkink and Walling 2007.
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On the demand side, U.S. interest in Latin America’s boomerangs was high in the
1970s and early 1980s for reasons of domestic American politics.16 Successive U.S.
administrations had battled with domestic critics over the human rights implications of
their anti-communist policies, and the American media followed these debates with
interest. Yet since America’s media agenda also diffused to other countries17, papers
elsewhere in the liberal west were also interested. Latin America was thus a pioneer in
the global market for human rights boomerangs for reasons of both supply and demand.
As marketing researchers have demonstrated, market order-of-entry can exert
powerful effects.18 Market pioneers often reap “first mover advantages” that secure long
term market share, consumer loyalty, and profit. In the early years of the boomerang
market, Latin America’s pioneering status gave it a larger share of the Western media’s
interest. Later, when the global supply of boomerang-throwers spread, Latin American
activists continued to benefit from elevated demand for reasons linked to its first mover
status.
In what follows, we define boomerang success and elaborate our theory of Latin
American advantage. We then test our claim statistically on data from the Economist and
Newsweek from 1980 to 2000, and explore our explanations’ validity through interviews
with senior journalists and paired case studies.
3. Defining Boomerang Success
16 Jacoby 1986; Muravchik 1986; Cmiel 1999; Forsythe 2000; Sikkink 2004. 17 Galtung 1971; Chang, Lau and Xiaoming 2000. 18 Lieberman and Montgomery 1988, 1998.
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Boomerang success can be defined in at least two stages of the cycle. In stage 1,
boomerangs are successful when purchased by Western media consumers, often with the
help of transnational activist-intermediaries. In stage 2, they are successful when they are
pitched back and have an observable and positive impact on actual conditions. In this
article, we concern ourselves with stage 1 success, defined as higher rates of country
coverage in explicit human rights terms by leading Western media sources.
Improved stage 1 understanding is crucial to stage 2 analysis but the two are not
perfectly correlated. Palestinian activists, for example, have done a fine job of bringing
their concerns to the international community, but their physical conditions have hardly
improved as a result. Ordinary Mexicans in Chiapas, similarly, have experienced both
Zapatista media success and a worsening of real conditions.19 Nonetheless, any
comprehensive understanding of human rights impact should begin with explaining stage
1 success: how and when are boomerangs likely to be caught?
4. To Catch a Boomerang
In recent years, a handful of IR scholars have generated crucial knowledge about
conditions for stage 1 success. Some have focused on international reporting on country-
level abuses, finding that both transnational activists and the Western media focus more
heavily on countries with higher rates of abuse, larger economies, greater Western policy
relevance, higher rates of economic development, more democracy, elevated levels of
previous attention, and higher rates of U.S. military assistance.20 Others have focused
more specifically on local boomerang throwers, finding that they do better when speaking
19 Physicians for Human Rights 2006. 20 Ron, Ramos and Rodgers 2005; Ramos, Ron and Thoms 2007.
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about grave personal integrity violations21 and have charismatic leaders, better public
relations skills, and tighter connections to powerful transnational gatekeepers.22 Still
others have studied relations between local and transnational activists23, or between
distinct segments of the transnational activist arena.24
None of these scholars has statistically modeled locally-thrown boomerangs,
however, and none have focused on the theoretical and empirical links between
boomerangs and geographic place.25 Existing scholarship tacitly implies that boomerangs
face equal chances of success when thrown about similar issues with similar vigor and
skill. Our claim, however, is quite different. Boomerangs thrown from some places, we
believe, are more likely to succeed in attracting Western media attention than when
thrown from others.
5. The Latin American Advantage
Boomerangs thrown from Latin America have flown farther and higher than those
thrown from anywhere else. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Latin American activists were
the first to enter the global boomerang market, and thus enjoyed distinct advantages in
both supply and demand. Some of these persisted over time, ensuring the success of the
region’s boomerangs well into the 1990s. We begin with an analysis of Latin America’s
boomerang supply side advantages.
21 Keck and Sikkink 1998 22 Bob 2005 23 Hertel 2007 24 Carpenter 2007a, 2007b. 25 Scholars such as Keck and Sikkink (1998) or Bob (2005) use qualitative methods to study boomerang success, but do not factor geographic place into their analyses. Ramos, Ron and Thoms (2007), by contrast, quantitatively study geographic variation, but their focus is country level abuse, rather than boomerangs. In this article, we bring the study of geography and boomerangs together, and use quantitative techniques to model the latter.
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Historically, European-style nation-states appeared in Latin America long before
other areas in the global South,26 and have thus enjoyed longer and more elaborated
histories of law making, law enforcement, and constitutionalism. More importantly, the
dominant ideology of anti-colonial liberation during Latin America’s 19th century
struggles was Liberalism, a precursor to modern human rights.27 The Marxist ideologies
prevalent during mid-20th century decolonization in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, by
contrast, were less sympathetic to notions of individual liberal rights.28 As a result, Latin
American intellectuals and diplomats were early leaders in international law and the
international bill of rights.29
Elements of the Latin American Catholic Church also contributed to the region’s
early abundance of local rights activists. During Spanish and Portuguese rule, prominent
clergy supported rights-based approaches to indigenous protection.30 In the 1960s, Latin
America’s Catholics were the driving force behind the Second Vatican Council of 1962-
65, helping to connect Christianity with philosophies of rights, social activism, and
democracy.31 This affinity between religious and human rights organizations and
doctrines is unique; neither other Christian denominations nor their Hindu, Buddhist or
Muslim counterparts have developed equally dense ties to the international human rights
movement.32 As a result, few critics of the international human rights movement’s neo-
imperialist tendencies in Asia, Africa or the Middle East have extended similar
arguments to Latin America. 26 Holsti 1996. 27 Wright-Carroza 2003. 28 Colburn 1994. 29 Wright-Carroza 2003; Sikkink 2004. 30 Wright-Carroza 2003. 31Cleary 1990; Smith 1991. 32 We distinguish between religion’s theological compatibility with human rights and its organizational ties to contemporary transnational human rights workers.
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More recently, statistical studies show that the global diffusion of local human
rights NGOs began in Latin America during the 1970s, a decade or more before its
broader dissemination.33 As a result, the region’s formal institutional mechanisms for
human rights redress are strong in comparison to Africa, which has a weak formal
mechanism, or to Asia and the Middle East, which have none.34 For similar reasons, Latin
America has been a world leader in the global cascade of post-authoritarian and post-
conflict justice seeking.35 Thus while the organizational model of a “local human rights
NGO” and post-conflict or post-authoritarian “transitional justice” is now globally
distributed, both processes began in Latin America, creating an early lead in the number,
skill and transnational connectedness of local activists.
On the demand side, Latin America’s violations were a leading theme in
American policy debates in the 1970s and 1980s, years before Washington’s human
rights interests diffused elsewhere.36 In the early 1970s, the Vietnam debacle had helped
Congressional liberals challenge the country’s traditional anti-communist policies by
promoting innovative legislation and bureaucratic procedures that helped expose abuses
by America’s authoritarian allies. Geographic and strategic proximity - combined with
Church activism and other transnational links - made Latin America a leading candidate
for scrutiny by domestic critics of America’s Cold War policies. As a result, U.S ties to
right-wing governments in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and
33 Ball 2000. 34 Weston, Lukes and Hnatt 1987. The Council of Europe created a human rights convention, commission and court in 1953; the Organization of American States (OAS) established a human rights commission in 1959, approved a convention in 1969, and created a court in 1978; the Organization of African Unity (OAU) - later the African Union - approved a human rights charter in 1986, created a commission in 1987, and established a court in 2004. 35 Sikkink and Walling 2007; Sikkink 2008; 36 Muravchik 1986; Forsythe 1990; Cmiel 1999; Sikkink 2004.
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Guatemala, among others, were all carefully scrutinized by U.S.-based activists and
politicians, and were discussed at length by the American media.
The trend towards Latin America-focused debates was accelerated by the Carter
Administration in the late 1970s, which made respect for human rights a rhetorical
priority. It then received another boost from the second Reagan Administration, which
embraced human rights language while seeking to divert criticism towards the USSR and
its allies.37 A key element in the conservative’s new strategy was an effort to counter
liberal-left allegations of abuse in Latin America. As this conservative-liberal debate
accelerated, abuses in Latin America moved to center stage. Yet since U.S. policy and
media agendas influence those of other countries,38 the demand for Latin American
boomerangs spread to other media sources in the liberal west.
In the 1990s, local boomerang supply diffused globally as a result of the spread of
local human rights NGOs and transitional justice efforts. U.S. domestic politics also
changed, draining the energy from the conservative-liberal debates that had given the
American media reason to catch Latin American boomerangs. Latin America’s
advantage, however, persisted. Why?
Our argument hinges on the advantages accruing to early market entrants, a
phenomenon identified by scholars across issue areas and disciplines. Studies of national
economic development, for example, demonstrate that early industrializing countries
enjoyed pronounced advantages over comparatively “backward” nations.39 Studies of
social movements, similarly, find that early entrants to activist protest cycles enjoy
37 Jacoby 1986 38 Galtung 1971; Chang, Lau and Xiaoming 2000. 39 Gerschenkron 1992.
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stronger influence than latecomers.40 Scholars of scientific knowledge production, for
their part, show that early knowledge promoters garner more attention than late
promoters.41 Although the mechanisms in these and other cases may differ, they all
highlight the importance of locked-in early riser advantages and path dependency.42
The literature most pertinent to our case is that of strategic management, where
scholars find that early market entry can confer benefits in market share, consumer
preference and profitability.43 Pioneer firms are often designated as prototypical –
consider Kleenex, Xerox or Coca Cola - and consumers develop familiarity with, and
loyalty to, their brand. Consumers become resistant to change and new brands, forcing
latecomer suppliers to spend much more on marketing. Being first-to-market, in other
words, often generates long-term, protected market shares.
Extending these lessons to the global market for human rights boomerangs, we
claim that Latin America’s early efforts became prototypical, and identify three separate
mechanisms that secured the region’s long-term advantage. First, Western journalists,
editors, policymakers, and activists grew intimately familiar with the Latin American
boomerang, developing detailed knowledge of its origins, trajectory, and implications for
American politics. This knowledge and vested interest shaped reporting for years to
come. Second, many abuses from the 1980s remained policy relevant into the 1990s
because of the region’s transitional justice seeking efforts. As former dictators and
military leaders faced accountability for their past crimes, debates over America’s past
misdeeds maintained the Latin American boomerang’s relevance. Finally, Latin
40 Minkoff 1997. 41 Bonitz 2005. 42 Pierson 1990. 43 Lieberman and Montgomery 1988 and 1998.
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American activists from the 1970s and 1980s went on to occupy influential positions in
global human rights institutions in the 1990s,44 boosting general interest in, and
receptivity to, Latin American boomerangs.
6. Hypotheses
This discussion raises three distinct expectations. First, the conventional wisdom on
human rights boomerangs – which we support - suggests that stronger boomerangs will
boost Western media coverage, regardless of geographic place. Thus:
H1: Countries more able to throw stronger boomerangs are associated with
higher levels of Western human rights media coverage.
Second, our theory of Latin American advantage suggests that the region’s
boomerangs gained more coverage than boomerangs from other areas. Thus:
H2: All else the same, Latin American countries are associated with higher levels
of Western human rights media coverage.
Third, we expect a Latin American advantage both prior to and after the end of
the Cold War, but for different reasons. Thus:
H3: Hypothesis 2 is not conditional on the Cold War, which has no discernable
impact on the relationship between Latin America’s boomerangs and Western
media coverage.
7. Statistical Methods and Data
We begin with quantitative data and analysis. The figure below shows a snapshot of the
average media coverage of human rights from 1980 to 2000 by the Economist and 44 Sikkink 2008.
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Newsweek (see below for details). To model the importance of geographic place, we use
two sets of measures. The first is a set of six regional variables while the second, used
here as a robustness check, is a set of quasi-regional “civilization” variables constructed
from Huntington45 by Beckfield.46
Figure 1 includes yearly data on regional and world averages, presented in
separate sub-graphs for each of the six regions, described below in greater detail.
!"#$%R' )"*+R% ,- Average Media 7overage of :u<an Rights by RegionC
Figure 1 shows that, on average, some regions receive more Western media
coverage of abuses than others. In the Powerful West – the group of Western liberal
countries that are most likely to catch a boomerang – mass media coverage of abuses in
that region ranks below the world’s average. This is not surprising, because there are
fewer severe abuses there than elsewhere. Western mass media coverage of Latin
American abuses exceeds world averages from 1980 to 1990, but then fluctuates above,
below and in tandem. Abuses in (former) Soviet Bloc countries are on average more
heavily reported upon from 1980 to 1990, but that trend then reverses. Average media
coverage of abuses in Africa remains substantially below the world average throughout
1980-2000. Asia often receives more Western media coverage than the world average
from 1989 onward, but the media substantially underreports abuses in the Middle East
from 1985 to 1995.
45 Huntington 1996. 46 Beckfield 2003.
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Next, we test our hypotheses by modeling the relationship between boomerangs
and average media coverage, while also considering other factors. Our data are structured
in country-year format and cover 148 countries from 1980 to 2000. We use negative
binomial regression because our dependent variable consists of over-dispersed averages
of yearly counts.47 We use GEE estimation (generalized estimating equations) of
population averaged models because our panel data are highly correlated.48 Because the
data also display signs of autocorrelation, we include a lagged dependent variable in
some models, but in others use a first-order autocorrelation structure. We lag all
independent variables by one year on the assumption that their effects will take some
time to be felt, and adjust the standard errors for clustering on countries repeatedly
observed in our country-year data matrix. Overall, this approach is consistent with
previous research.49
Average media coverage
Our dependent variable, average media coverage, consists of data collected by coding
Economist and Newsweek articles with the keywords “human rights” from 1980 to 2000,
plus a specific violation in a specific country-year. When an article discusses more than
one country or abuse, coders took note of only the first of each. The data include 1,242
articles published in the international edition of the Economist, and 1,059 published in the
U.S. edition of Newsweek.50 Weekly sources were chosen over daily media for
feasibility’s sake. During the 1990s, for example, the New York Times published 14,496
47 Cameron and Trivedi 1986; King 1989; Long 1997. 48 Zorn 2001; Hardin and Hilbe 2003. 49 Ron, Ramos and Rodgers 2005; Ramos, Ron and Thoms 2007. 50 For a more detailed description of the data, see Ramos, Ron and Thoms (2007). Other scholars have used the data, including Hafner-Burton (2008).
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articles with the term ‘‘human rights,’’ compared with 1,776 and 973 in the Economist
and Newsweek, respectively. Since previous research recommends using more than one
media source,51 weeklies were a reasonable and feasible choice.
The Economist is a European-based publication with a broad but elite readership.
In 2002, its circulation was 880,000, just under half of which were in North America. A
further 20 percent were in continental Europe, 15 percent were in the U.K., and 10
percent were in Asia.52 According to surveys, Economist readers are well off, influential,
and internationally aware.53 Newsweek provides balance; it is U.S.-based, has a much
larger North American audience than the Economist (19.5 million), and its readers are
both poorer and less cosmopolitan.54
Taken together, these publications are useful indicators of the Western media’s
international agenda. As previous research demonstrates, the Economist and Newsweek
follow similar rates of change in usage of the term “human rights” to Le Monde, the New
York Times, the Guardian, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.55 To correct for
biases, we created our dependent variable, average media coverage, by averaging the
Economist and Newsweek values for each country-year, providing a closer match with the
other four leading daily sources discussed above. In some models, we include lagged
average media coverage to address problems of autocorrelation and control for inertia.
51 Mueller 1997, Swank 2000. 52 Economist 2004. 53 In 2004, Economist readers had a median personal income of $154,000 USD; 95 percent were college educated; 44 percent were company directors; 62 percent took three or more international trips per year; and 70 percent had lived abroad at least once (Economist 2004). 54 Newsweek 2004. In 2003, North American Newsweek readers had a median personal income of $41, 662; 44 percent were college graduates; and six percent were ‘‘top management.’’ 55 Ramos, Ron and Thoms 2007, 386-88.
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The procedure for identifying and coding the Economist and Newsweek articles
has both strengths and weaknesses. Strict inclusion of only those articles with the term
“human rights” omits other accounts of repression and thus under-estimates overall
Western media coverage of abuse. Yet this procedure also provides a consistent estimate
of the media’s deployment of human rights language. Another tradeoff is the data’s focus
on quantity rather than quality of coverage; our measure does not capture the articles’
tone or nuance, but does provide a reliable indicator of overall flow. This classic validity-
reliability tradeoff is unavoidable, and future studies may expand the analysis through
qualitative analysis.
Boomerangs
We cannot directly measure the supply of boomerang throws (i.e., informed calls for
redress of human rights abuses to international audiences), but we can identify the places
and times when local activists are most able and apt to throw boomerangs.
Repression
Boomerangs carry information, and we begin with the conventional expectation that
boomerangs are most likely to be thrown - and caught by the mainstream Western media
- when conveying information about terrible atrocities.56 Publics tend to be most
sympathetic to, and curious about, major human rights violations such as massacre,
murder and torture, and the mass media tends to favor coverage of such shocking events.
To account for this, we use a widely-used measure of repression, David Cingranelli and
56 Keck and Sikkink 2008.
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David Richard’s (CIRI) variable on physical integrity abuses.57 These data are culled by
scholars from the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International’s annual reports, and
are used to estimate a state’s propensity to use torture, arbitrary detention, forced
disappearance and extrajudicial execution. Scores range from zero, or “least repressive,”
to eight, or “most repressive.” Elevated scores signify worse human rights conditions and
thus the potential for stronger boomerang throws, and should therefore be associated with
higher average media coverage.
Freedom of Speech
To throw boomerangs effectively, local activists also need ways to publicize information
about abuses and spread the word, both inside and outside the country. Their publicizing
efforts are greatly aided by government respect for their right to free speech, which grants
them access to local, uncensored and relatively independent press sources. Thus, we
expect that local activists will be most able and apt to throw boomerangs when they can
hold rallies and print their stories in local press sources, helping them to propel the
boomerang further than they could on their own. We measure the restriction of free
speech, again using CIRI data.58 Scores range from 0, or “least restrictions”, to 2, or
“most restrictions.” We expect that activists in countries with fewer free speech
restrictions will be more likely to throw boomerangs, and will thus be associated with
more average media coverage.
Transnational Advocacy Links
57 Data obtained via the web, from: http://ciri.binghamton.edu/. Data are not available for 1980. 58 http://ciri.binghamton.edu/. Data are not available for 1980.
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We also expect that the Western media is more likely to catch boomerangs when they are
thrown by local activists from countries with strong links to the global network of
international NGOs59 who are important factors in the global structuring of human rights-
related practices.60 Usually, such links are measured by the number of ties to international
NGOs (INGOs) in a given country. We measure number of INGO ties with data from
Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui.61 Countries with greater INGO links have more potential to
throw boomerangs, and we anticipate that more ties will be associated with increased
average media coverage.
Transnational Advocacy Attention
Boomerangs are also more likely to be thrown by local activists, and caught by the
Western media, when transnational activists are already engaged with the country in
question.62 Above, we described these activists as “market intermediaries” connecting
local suppliers with media consumers. We measure their level of activity by number of
Amnesty International press releases filed in a given country-year, using data from culled
from Amnesty International.63 We expect that local activists working in countries with
more transnational advocacy attention will also be better equipped to throw boomerangs.
Thus, countries with more Amnesty press releases will be associated with more average
media coverage.
59 Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez 1997. 60 Tsutsui and Wotipka 2004; Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Smith and Wiest 2005. 61 Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005. 62 Keck and Sikkink 1998; Bob 2005. 63 Amnesty International 2000, as coded in Ramos, Ron and Thoms 2007. These data are not coded from the same source as the CIRI measures on human rights or free speech.
22
Boomerang Supply
Finally, we create an ordinal measure of likely boomerang supply, based upon the
presence or absence of these four components. We first create four dummy variables,
measuring whether a country in a specific year does (one) or does not (zero) rank above
the world average for abuses of physical integrity rights, below the world average for
restrictions on free speech, and above the world average on INGO links and Amnesty
International attention. A “one” in any category represents a greater ability and aptness of
local NGO communities to throw boomerangs. Next, we add these variables together,
creating a new measure, Boomerang. Scores range from zero, or “least likely to throw a
boomerang,” to four, or “most likely to throw a boomerang.” We use this variable, as
well as the four component variables, to test the hypothesis that the Western mass media
is most likely to print stories on human rights in countries where local activists are more
able and apt to throw boomerangs.
Regions
Our second hypothesis stated that Latin American countries will receive more Western
media coverage than countries elsewhere, even when boomerangs are likely to be thrown
with equal force and skill. To test this, we modeled geographic place by creating six
regions from the countries in our dataset: the Powerful West, comprising 28 countries;
Asia, with 34 countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan; Latin America, 33 countries;
the Middle East and North Africa, 21 countries; Sub-Saharan Africa, 46 countries; and
the (former) Soviet Bloc and Central Asia, 31 countries. In our analysis, we treat each
23
region as a dummy variable for a given country-year. See the Appendix for details of
countries included in each region.
Our groupings are generally based on geography, with slight modifications in the
case of the Powerful West, a category justified by economic, political and cultural
considerations. When local activists throw boomerangs, they usually aim them towards
the Powerful West, seeking to capture the attention of the governments that are most
likely and able to intervene on their behalf. In short, this region is the main source of
global boomerang consumption, and it includes the industrialized, westernized countries
across North America and Western Europe, along with three from Asia – Japan, Australia
and New Zealand.
Post Cold War
To test whether the quantity of media reporting during the Cold War changed in the post
Cold War, we construct a dummy variable, Post Cold War, with a value of zero for 1980-
1989, and a value of one for 1990-2000. We also run separate statistical models for 1980-
1989 and 1990-2000.
Controls
Consistent with previous research, we include a number of control variables that we also
expect to have some influence on human rights reporting.
We include a measure of respect for domestic regime type from the revised Polity IV
scores.64 This variable ranges from -10 (most autocratic) to 10 (most democratic) and is
an index of the competitiveness of a country’s chief executive selection, openness to 64 Marshall et al. 2002; Marshall and Jaggers 2002.
24
social groups, the level of institutional constraints placed on the executive’s authority, the
competitiveness of political participation, and the degree to which binding rules govern
participation. We expect low polity scores to be associated with more human rights
reporting.
We also measure the number of battle deaths with data from Lacina and
Gleditsch,65 version 1.0, and expect more deaths to be associated with higher average
media coverage.
Previous work found that economic development boosts the Western media’s
human rights reporting,66 and we control for this with Gross Domestic Product per
capita, obtained from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.
The mass communications literature suggests that more powerful states should
gain more media coverage, largely due to their increased weight in the international
system. We model state power with GDP per capita, as noted above, as well as with size
of military, drawn from the Correlates of War II Project’s National Military Capabilities
3.0; and with size of population, drawn from US Census International Data Base (IDB)
mid-year estimates. We expect both to be positively associated with average media
coverage, and log these variables because of extreme outliers at both the lower and upper
ends of their distributions.
Previous work suggests that foreign news coverage in general is associated with
stronger country connections to Western powers,67 and the same should be true for
human rights.68 To control for this, we include a measure of Official Development
65 Lacina and Gleditsch 2005. 66 Ramos, Ron and Thoms 2007. 67 Johnson 1997. 68 Ovsiovitch 1993; Fan and Ostini 1999.
25
Assistance (ODA), logged, drawing on the World Bank’s World Development Indicators,
US military assistance, logged, based on the U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants database,69
as well as geodesic proximity to Washington D.C., logged, based on data made available
by the CEPII Research Center. We expect higher levels of ODA and U.S. assistance and
closer proximity to the U.S. to be associated with higher average media coverage.
8. Statistical Findings
We begin with Table 1. In Model 1, we exclude the Powerful West region, making it a
reference. This model reports negative binomial regression coefficients from GEE
population averaged models with a lagged dependent variable. Model 2 reports the same
estimates, now using Latin America as a reference. Both models estimate separate
coefficients for the four boomerang components: physical integrity abuses, restrictions on
free speech, INGO links and attention from Amnesty International. In Model 3, we
replace the four boomerang components from Model 2 with the single ordinal variable,
Boomerang. Model 4 replicates Model 3 with an AR-1 correlation structure. The last
column reports percent changes to interpret the negative binomial coefficients from
Model 3.
The results in this table show statistically that the Western mass media is more
likely to print stories covering human rights in countries where local activists are most
able and apt to throw boomerangs. Models 1 and 2 show how the specific components of
the boomerang relate to media coverage. Countries with more severe violations of
physical integrity, such as murder and torture, are statistically likely to receive more
Western mass media coverage of human rights, holding all other variables (including the 69 USAID 2004.
26
other boomerang-relevant variables) constant. Countries that are more heavily linked up
with INGOs or have the attention of transnational activists are also statistically more
likely to have their human rights situations covered by the Western mass media when the
other variables in these models are held steady. The statistical results are inconclusive,
however, about countries with fewer restrictions on free speech – the coefficients are
negative, as expected, but do not reach statistical significance.
Models 3 and 4 provide stronger evidence. They show that the media is more
likely to cover human rights in countries where the overall conditions are riper for local
activists to throw boomerangs. In both models, countries that are more likely to throw a
boomerang (with a higher Boomerang score) are also more likely to be the subject of
Western mass media stories on human rights. The last column shows that increasing a
country’s Boomerang score by one standard deviation boosts the number of media
articles about human rights in that country by almost 40%, which is a larger effect than
that of most other independent variables.
Apart from these findings, the results also show that the Western mass media is
likely to catch boomerangs from some places more than others, even when local activists
are equally able and apt to throw boomerangs. Model 1 shows that countries in Latin
America are statistically likely to receive more media coverage of human rights than the
Powerful West, all else the same. The results from Models 2, 3 and 4 show that the media
are more likely to cover human rights in Latin America than just about any other region
(except the former Soviet Bloc). The last column shows that when activists are equally
able and apt to throw boomerangs, being in Latin America boosts the number of media
articles about a country by more than 200%.
27
All told, the four models in Table 1 support our hypotheses that (1) the Western
mass media is more likely to cover human rights in countries where local activists are
most able and apt to throw boomerangs, but that (2) countries in Latin America are
receiving more media coverage than countries in other regions, even when the supply of
boomerangs is likely equal.
[INSERT TABLES 1 and 2]
We move next to Table 2, which also uses Latin America as the reference region
and includes the same controls, and uses the same regression techniques, as in Table 1
(Model 3). The first three models test our third hypothesis about the pre and post Cold
War periods. Model 5 includes a Post Cold War variable, while Models 6 and 7 trim the
sample to 1980 – 1989 and 1990 – 2000, respectively. They all show that our two main
findings are statistically likely both during and after the Cold War. Western mass media
coverage of human rights is greater after the Cold War than during. Even so, the
boomerang effect shapes media coverage in both periods, but countries in Latin America
receive more coverage than countries in other regions with equal capacity to throw
boomerangs in both periods.
The last two models explore related questions. Model 8 introduces interaction
terms between the Boomerang and different regions. It tests the conditional hypotheses
that an increase in the likely supply of boomerangs is associated with an increase in
Western media coverage only when boomerangs are thrown from countries in a specific
region (all else the same). The significant interaction terms indicate that the boomerang
28
effect on media coverage is different in the different regions (except Asia). Countries in
Latin America receive more media coverage than countries in most other regions, but, in
those other regions, countries more likely to supply boomerangs still receive more media
coverage than countries less likely to supply them.
Model 9 replaces our regional categories with civilization categories conceived of
by Huntington70 and used by Beckfield.71 These categories include African, Buddhist,
Hindu, Islamic, Japanese, Latin American, Orthodox, Sino and Western civilizations. The
reference civilization is Latin American. The results are broadly consistent. The Western
mass media is statistically more likely to print human rights stories on countries with a
strong supply of boomerangs but reports more on Latin American civilizations than on
African, Hindu, Japanese, Islamic or Sino ones, even when boomerangs are equally likely
to be thrown from these places.
We ran several additional robustness checks that we do not report in the tables in
order to economize on space. We ran non-population averaged models, and replaced the
CIRI variable on physical integrity rights abuses with alternative data collected by Poe
and Tate.72 We also replicated our models, excluding the countries that received the most
extreme average media coverage: Argentina, China, Chile, El Salvador, Indonesia, Iran,
Russia, USSR, Turkey, UK and the US. In all of these models, our findings remain
substantively and statistically significant.
In short, we find some of the first global and statistically strong evidence for the
transnational advocacy literature’s central expectation. According to our analysis, the
Western mass media is more likely to cover human rights in countries where activists are
70 Huntington 1996. 71 Beckfield 2003. 72 Poe and Tate 1994.
29
most able and apt to throw boomerangs. At the same time, however, we also find strong
evidence for geographic inequalities in the demand side of the process. When activists are
similarly likely to throw boomerangs with equal force from two different places, the
mainstream Western press is more likely to catch the boomerang thrown from Latin
America than from most other places, no matter the likely skill level or motivation of the
local activists.
The multivariate regression techniques we used can discover and help confirm
empirical patterns, but they do a somewhat poorer job of elaborating causal factors and
mechanisms.73 We turn now to key informant interviews and carefully chosen
comparative case studies74 to further investigate our key finding: the mainstream Western
media covers human rights boomerangs from Latin America more frequently than from
elsewhere in the world.
9. Key Informant Interviews
For qualitative input, we emailed a questionnaire outlining our statistical results and
requesting feedback to several dozen senior journalists. We chose our respondents for
their rich knowledge of - and concrete experience with – Western reporting of
international affairs. Many had worked for the Economist or Newsweek, and most had
served as foreign correspondents and/or bureau chiefs in major world cities. As an
external validity check, we also canvassed and received responses from journalists and
editors with experience at other mainstream sources, including Foreign Affairs,
73 Lieberman 2005; Mahoney and Goertz 2006. 74 Ragin 1987; George and Bennet 2005.
30
Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, Ottawa Citizen (Canada), and Die
Zeit (Germany). Over a dozen respondents in total replied.
Overall, our respondents were unsurprised by Latin America’s comparative
human rights visibility in the Cold War years (1980-89), but few expected Latin
America’s continued prominence thereafter (1990-2000). Our statistical models captured
many of the causal variables they listed for Latin America’s 1980s prominence. Thus one
current Newsweek editor emphasized Latin America’s proximity to the U.S., noting that
“Latin America is in the United States' back yard. Lots of people live here with
connections down there, and it’s within the U.S. sphere of influence. So it seems logical
that people will be more concerned with what goes on down there than in some far off
part of the world.”75 A long-time Newsweek correspondent and bureau chief concurred,
noting that “the extent to which Washington opposed abuses -- or became complicit in
them -- developed into a major part of the story.” 76 And, finally, he noted, reporters,
activists, and politicians had a sense of efficacy when it came to Latin American abuses,
because of U.S. influence in the region. Congressional battles over U.S. aid to Latin
American regimes, he said, played a crucial role in promoting this sentiment. The U.S.
policy linkage issue was at least partially captured through our proximity to Washington
D.C. and U.S. military assistance variables, and our “theory of Latin American
advantage” discussed the Congressional angle at some length.
Another Latin-America based correspondent emphasized the importance of
regional democratization in the 1980s and early 1990s, which provided “a channel of
protest that found a wider audience, one that was perhaps unavailable to Asians and
75 Email 26 February 2009. 76 Email 20 April 2009.
31
Africans, where human rights abuses were surely just as serious if not worse.” 77 Again,
these factors were captured by our Polity IV score and restriction of free speech
variables.
Several respondents noted contributions by elements of the Catholic Church,
including one who said that liberation theologians had managed to transform Church
elements into “champion(s) of civilians and … critic(s) of governments.” Or, as a current
Newsweek correspondent put it, “In the case of Latin America … much of the human
rights reporting and even more of the general consciousness raising … was done by the
Catholic Church. Several of the religious orders, most famously the Jesuits and the
Maryknolls, were involved...”78 Although Church-related activism at the local and
transnational level was crucial in our theoretical account of the “Latin American
advantage,” we were unable to model its impact statistically.
A former Newsweek editor79 and a former Economist and Washington Post
editor,80 among others, argued for the importance of a U.S. policy link. “Human rights
abuses are more frequently covered when their continuation appears to depend at least in
part on US foreign policy,” the former Economist and Post journalist argued, and in “the
1980s, the wars in Central America created a direct link between human rights in the
region and US policy.” For most journalists, he said, the key question was whether “US
foreign policy [was] aiding and abetting human rights abuses.” This was particularly
important for “US-centric journalists,” he said, which included - to his mind - the
London-based Economist. Statistically, we were partially able to test the impact of U.S.
77 Email 26 February 2009. 78 Email 20 April 2009. 79 Email 20 April 2009. 80 Email 25 February 2009.
32
policy links through the Overseas Development Assistance and U.S. military assistance
variables, but neither are perfect proxies. Both overlook covert aid and informal
diplomatic linkages, while proximity to Washington D.C. controls imperfectly for “U.S.
centricism.”
One respondent went further, offering a new causal factor that interacted with the
others to create Latin American prominence in the 1980s. This veteran editor argued that
the above-listed factors only mattered in combination with an epic ideological war
between American conservatives and radicals. 81 In the 1980s, he said, radical leftists
were reeling from a conservative resurgence in the U.S. and U.K. and from a string of
failed communist experiments. They were “desperate for some new alternative … [to]
provide a good basis for anti-American outrage,” and Latin America’s Cold War-era
insurgencies assumed that role. Situated against this backdrop, conflicts “inherently
trivial” to the U.S. policy agenda became central policy preoccupations, as did their
associated abuses. The media followed suit, the respondent said, because it was an
“unthinking and often unconscious follower” of radical left thought. Without this
ideological war, he argued, the other causal variables would not have propelled Latin
America’s boomerangs to center stage.
Our interviews thus validated most of our initial theories, confirmed many of our
causal hypotheses, and drew our attention to a handful of factors not captured in our
theoretical or statistical analysis. Importantly, only one respondent provided a path
dependent explanation for Latin America’s continued high profile in the 1990s.
According to this longtime Newsweek correspondent,82 “it takes a long time for human
81 Email 26 February 2009. 82 Email 20 April 20 2009.
33
rights issues to die – for Pinochet to get prosecuted at last, for example. There’s a lot of
cleaning up to do after decades of extreme repression.” Thus, Latin America’s early local
activism, transitional justice and successful boomerangs set in motion legal, institutional
and normative processes that played out well in the 1990s, continuing to attract media
attention.
This correspondent also provided a second path dependent explanation that spoke
to the “consumer preference” and “brand loyalty” themes discussed above. “The media,”
she said, “may be accustomed to seeing Latin America through a human rights lens.
Those are the stories they’re accustomed to looking for.” Having identified the region
with the human rights “brand” early on, reporters and editors continued to look for - and
report on - similarly framed stories well in the 1990s.
Our interviews thus bolstered our causal analysis for the 1980s, but made a less
robust contribution to explanations for the 1990s. To triangulate and probe further, we
turn to the case study method.
10. Case Studies
We also use case studies to help test, elaborate and uncover the causal mechanisms and
sequences, while also exploring variable validity.83 Here, we briefly explore the
experiences of six countries over time, organized in three comparative pairs:
Argentina/India, Guatemala/ Ethiopia, and Chile/ Indonesia.
83 Ragin 1987; King, Koehane and Verba 1994; George and Bennet 2005; Lieberman 2005; Mahoney and Goertz 2006.
34
To select these six countries we drew on King, Keohane and Verba’s84 injunction
to select cases on the independent variables of interest without prior knowledge of the
outcome – in this case, average media coverage. Since our leading claim is that Latin
American countries tend to benefit from special advantages, each pair includes one
country from that region and one country from another region. And since we also focus
on the importance of boomerang-throwing potential, both countries in each pair have
roughly similar Boomerang values.
These criteria narrowed the pool, but still left a range of possible countries. We
thus employed three other selection criteria: First, we focused on countries with
significant experiences of internal unrest and political violence, believing these represent
“most likely” cases for boomerang coverage. Second, we chose “information rich”85
Latin American countries due to their extensive treatment in the IR literature. Third, our
non-Latin American cases vary along the religious dimension, helping us to probe our
claim about the Latin American Church’s key role.
No case criteria for case selection are without flaws, and this is especially true for
mixed method efforts. When cases are selected without attention to their scores on the
dependent variable, moreover, they may not illustrate the main statistical findings as
cleanly as one might hope; that is the frustration and art of qualitative research. Thus
while our cases help illustrate our theoretical arguments and statistical findings, they also
raise important and partially unexplained questions for further investigation.
A) Argentina/ India, 1980s
84 King, Keohane and Verba 1994. 85 Patton 2002.
35
During the 1980s, Argentina’s average annual Boomerang score was 2.4 out of a
possible 4. Local boomerang-throwing conditions were thus above the world average, but
not superb, largely because of improving human rights conditions after the country’s
1976-83 “dirty war.” Yet the Economist and Newsweek still reported on Argentina 44
times in explicit human rights terms.
India’s human rights boomerangs in the 1980s, by contrast, attracted no attention
at all in human rights terms, despite having slightly better boomerang throwing
conditions (a mean Boomerang score of 3.2 in the 1980s). In fact, the Economist and
Newsweek wrote not a single article on human rights in India during this time, despite
intense violations of physical integrity rights as a result of internal conflicts in the Punjab
and Assam regions, and waves of Sikh-Hindu communal violence.86 Violence against
Dalits (the former “Untouchables”) also continued apace. Thus while India had higher
Boomerang scores and a vastly larger population, Argentina’s boomerangs attracted more
Western media attention.
Our theoretical and empirical work above helps explain Argentina’s advantage. In
the late 1970s, Argentina’s civil society was one of the first participants in the global
boomerang market.87 Its activists were impassioned, internationally oriented, middle class
and skilled, enjoying just enough freedom of speech to mount effective boomerangs.88
After the dirty war’s end in 1983, Argentina became a world leader in post-authoritarian
justice-seeking, attracting broad regional and international attention with its 1985
indictment of senior officers and, one year later, its controversial amnesty laws.89 Much
86 Guha 2007. 87 Brysk 1994. 88 Bouvard 1994. 89 Sikkink 2008.
36
of the media’s interest was also fueled by America’s geographic proximity and policy
engagement with the country; Argentina had played an early and prominent role in
Washington’s anti-communist strategy for Latin America, lending local and transnational
activists an important “policy hook” in their efforts to sell Argentinean boomerangs.
India, by contrast, was a late entrant into the global boomerang market. Its civil
society had been dense and powerful since before Independence,90 but it was not a major
player in the transnational activist circuit until the 1990s, when debates over dam
construction, tribal displacement, and Dalit rights went global.91 Unlike Argentina,
moreover, India was traditionally left-leaning and geo-strategically non-aligned, giving
U.S. rights activists, journalists, and policymakers little reason to get involved. The U.S.
was not morally implicated in India’s abuses, and transnational activists felt little
compulsion to intervene. This indifference mirrored the view of the American policy
establishment and global capital, both of which avoided Indian engagements until the
1990s.92
The low rate of Western media interest in Indian boomerangs during this time can
also be explained by the limited engagement of India’s Sikh and Assam-region tribal
Diasporas with transnational rights actors. India’s Church was comparatively small,
moreover, and had little of the moral authority and intermediary capacity available to its
Latin American counterparts. Global Hindu and Muslim faith networks, for their part,
were not deeply engaged in rights-oriented transnational activism. Although much of this
has since changed, India in the 1980s was relatively isolated from the global boomerang
90 Varshney 2003. 91 Chandhoke 2002; Khagram 2004; Bob 2005. 92 Kapur and Ganguly 2007.
37
market – local activists were able to throw boomerangs but no one in the West was
interested to catch them. The “Latin American advantage” boosted the Western media’s
human rights interest in Argentina far above India, despite the latter’s more widespread
abuses and vastly larger population.
2) Guatemala/ Ethiopia, 1990s
In the 1990s, Guatemala’s annual Boomerang score was an average 2.09 of 4, a modest
score below the world’s average, and Ethiopia’s was an even weaker 1.3. Although both
suffered from intense physical integrity violations during the 1970s, 1980s, and part of
the 1990s, other factors undercut their boomerang-throwing potential, including low
numbers of INGOs. Yet the small difference in these countries’ average boomerang
scores during this period cannot account for the massive discrepancy in Western media
coverage of abuses. Western media interest in Guatemala’s boomerangs remained high,
with both Newsweek and the Economist reporting on the country in human rights terms
29 times during the 1990s. Ethiopia, by contrast, received only four stories during that
decade.
The scope of Guatemala’s abuses surely helped drive its high profile; according to
the country’s post-war truth commission, government forces killed most of the civil war’s
200,000 victims in an anti-left campaign that verged on the genocidal.93 In the history of
Latin American counter-insurgencies, Guatemala’s surely ranks as one of the most brutal.
Yet Ethiopia’s own experiences of violence under the left-leaning regime of Colonel
Mengistu Haile Mariam in the 1970s and 1980s were similarly awful, with victim
93 Commission for Historical Clarification 1999.
38
numbers rivaling those of Guatemala’s.94 Although Mengistu was driven into exile in
1991, new regionally-based insurgencies soon erupted, leading to the re-emergence of
substantial government repression. Thus any explanation based solely on the extent and
scope of the two countries’ abuses fails to convince.
In fact, the Western media’s disinterest in Ethiopian boomerangs is even more
intriguing given the country’s unique transitional justice experiment in the 1990s. After
driving Mengistu into exile in 1991, the new Ethiopian government created a special
prosecutor’s office to investigate, indict and try the former dictator and thousands of his
co-regime members. Although Mengistu remained protected in Harare throughout the
1990s, the trial proceeded apace in Addis Ababa, leading to his 1996 conviction in
absentia along with dozens of colleagues. Zimbabwe continued to resist extradition,
however, leading to a dramatic confrontation.95 Although local activists threw
boomerangs, the Western media all but ignored this story, as well as most other human
rights boomerangs emanating from Ethiopian territory in the 1990s. The lack of media
interest in Mengistu’s trial is especially noteworthy given its keen interest in Argentina’s
transitional justice a decade earlier. Post-conflict justice-seeking, in other words, is no
guarantee of Western media attention in and of itself.
What explains Guatemala’s high comparative visibility? For starters, human
rights conditions in the country had been hotly debated in Washington by activists,
legislators and policymakers for years. U.S. intelligence agencies had helped overthrow
94 Tiruneh 1993. 95 Kebede Tiba 2007.
39
the country’s elected leftist regime in the 1950s,96 and had maintained close ties to right-
wing elements ever since. And while President Jimmy Carter had cut American
assistance in 1979 to punish Guatemala’s leader for their civil war abuses, later
administrations continued with both overt and clandestine support.
This clear American policy linkage, when highlighted by local and transnational
activists, drove much of the media’s interest. This was particularly true in the 1990s,
when a Guatemalan military officer on the C.I.A.’s payroll was implicated in the murder
of a U.S. citizen, prompting outraged American calls for investigation and accountability.
Towards the end of the 1990s, moreover, Western media interest was further piqued by
the Guatemalan truth commission’s embarrassing indictment of US policy, which
prompted President Bill Clinton to make a formal apology for his country’s past role.97
Ethiopian repression was similarly deadly, but the culprits had not benefited from
much in the way of U.S. assistance. Instead, Mengistu had been a Soviet client, and his
“Red Terror” campaign of the late 1970s – which took place at roughly the same time as
Guatemala’s civil war abuses – had no link to the C.I.A. As a result, Ethiopia’s victims,
civil society and Diaspora communities were unable to generate the transnational media
attention available to their Latin American counterparts. Although the U.S. and other
Western countries did invest substantial development aid in the country in the 1990s, this
was a far cry from the morally wrenching and scandalous relationship between
Guatemala and U.S. intelligence agencies. And finally, although the country was largely
96 Schlesinger and Kinzer 1999. 97 New York Times, 7 March 1999; Washington Post, 11 March 1999, A1. As Sikkink (2004) notes, external attention had little impact on local conditions in Guatemala, providing an example of poor correlation between success in boomerang stages 1 and 2.
40
Christian, its church was a national rather than a transnational institution, and it had fewer
of the international activist and human rights connections available to Latin America’s
Church. As a result, Ethiopia’s clergy could not provide the same level of intermediary
services between local activist suppliers and Western consumers.
3) Chile/ Indonesia, 1980-2000
Our third and final paired comparison is Chile and Indonesia, 1980 to 2000, when the
boomerang-throwing potential in both countries was modest-to-strong. Chile’s average
annual Boomerang score was 3 during the two decades, while Indonesia’s was a close
2.8. When we break up time period into its pre and cost cold war decades, however, we
find both confirmation and disconfirmation of our theory.
In the 1980s, the “Latin American advantage” was clearly in effect, giving Chile’s
human rights activists a clear advantage over the much larger and more populous
Indonesia. During this decade, the Economist and Newsweek published 30 stories on
human rights in Chile, compared to only four on Indonesia. The 1980s thus support our
theory of a Latin American advantage, but the 1990s offer a very different view. In the
1990s, Western media demand for the goods produced by Indonesia’s boomerang-
throwing local activists grew exponentially, and the Economist and Newsweek now
published more than double the number of stories on Indonesia as on Chile. How should
we best explain this divergence?
Chile’s advantages in the 1980s are not hard to explain since it was one of the
region’s first pioneers in the global market for boomerangs. Transnationally-connected
local activists started sending boomerangs soon after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 U.S.-
41
backed coup against the elected leftist leader, Salvador Allende, and they continued to do
so at least until the return of democracy in 1990. During the 1980s, therefore, the market
for Chile’s boomerangs was fueled by factors similar to Guatemala’s, and Chile was an
even more infamous case of U.S. covert operations in Latin America.98
By some accounts, Chile should have preserved its comparative advantage over
Indonesia in the 1990s. Towards the end of that decade, conditions were particularly ripe
for the country’s boomerangs due to the indictment, London house arrest and extradition
hearings for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Unlike the Mengistu trial, which
passed almost unnoticed in the West, the Pinochet case set international legal precedent,
revolutionized the transitional justice community, and was major cause for debate in
Europe and North America.99 Not surprisingly, the number of human rights news reports
about events on Chilean territory climbed from one in 1997 to 11, 7, and 10 over the next
three years. Even though the Pinochet case was taking place in London, not Chile, the
Western media was still drawn to Chilean boomerangs because of the trial’s drama.
The Pinochet case was a classic example of early abuses from the 1970s and
1980s returning in the 1990s with a vengeance because of transitional justice efforts, high
profile legal cases, and an historic US policy link. The Western media’s interest in
Chilean boomerangs remained high in the 1990s, just as our theories and statistical
models would have predicted. And yet, Western media demand for Chile’s boomerangs
pales in comparison to its appetite for the Indonesian activists’ product. How can this
anomaly be explained?
98 Kornbluh 1993. 99 Ensalco 1999.
42
As was true for the Indian case, one is tempted to argue that sheer size matters.
Indonesia, like India, is a massive country with a large population, far bigger than Chile,
Guatemala or Argentina; shouldn’t size alone have led to increased coverage in the
1990s? Upon closer consideration, however, the argument fails to convince, since
international coverage of Indonesia varied dramatically from decade to decade, and
indeed from year to year. Although populations grow by several percent each year, they
are, for all intents and purposes, a constant, and no constant can explain a variable. Thus
we must turn elsewhere for an explanation of Indonesia’s extraordinary prominence in
the 1990s.
When we examine annual data from the 1990s, we see that the Western media’s
human rights interest in Indonesia was in fact both modest and constant from 1990 to
1997. For each of those years, the Economist and Newsweek ran, on average, about three
human rights-related stories on Indonesia. Much of this was driven by the 1991 massacre
of anti-government demonstrators in Dili, occupied East Timor. The Western media had
only barely covered East Timor’s occupation and subsequent devastation in the 1970s
and 1980s – an occupation that was, at least by some accounts, tolerated and perhaps
even encouraged by the U.S. The end of the Cold War, however, coupled with the Asian
spread of local human rights NGOs, placed East Timor and the 1991 killings on the
transnational activist agenda.100 The Asian economic crisis and subsequent
democratization struggles only added to this interest.
Yet the real exponential growth in Western media attention began in 1998, the
year that Suharto, Indonesia’s long-term dictator, was finally forced from office. That
year the number of relevant Economist and Newsweek stories jumped to 16. In 1999 and 100 Chandhoke 2002.
43
2000 another set of dramatic events further boosted coverage to 20 and 21 stories,
respectively: A U.N.-supported plebiscite in East Timor had led to an overwhelming
vote for independence, and this prompted a deadly rampage by pro-Indonesian militias
and military intervention by an Australian-led force. The sheer scale of Western and UN
intervention was so great that the media’s coverage of Indonesia outstripped its concern
with Chile.
The Indonesian case is an exception that helps support the rule. When all other
things are equal, according to our statistical model, Latin American countries should have
had an advantage in both the 1980s and 1990s. This was true for Chile in the 1980s, but
not in the 1990s. Yet all things were not equal in the 1990s, and the Western media’s
human rights interest in East Timor’s boomerangs grew dramatically because of a UN-
authorized intervention launched, in large part, on human rights grounds.
11. Implications
This article establishes statistically and then explores qualitatively a key finding: Human
rights boomerangs were more likely to be caught by mainstream Western media in the
1980s and 90s when launched from Latin America, even when conditions for boomerang-
launching elsewhere were comparable. This finding has several ramifications.
First, and most importantly, there is a global market for boomerangs. Boomerangs
are fully successful when they are first purchased by Western consumers in stage 1, and
then pitched back to offending countries - and have an observable and positive impact on
actual conditions - in stage 2. To work, a boomerang must pass successfully through both
stages. In this article, we focused on stage 1 success, arguing that one of the surest paths
is to convince Western media sources to catch the boomerang and report on abuses.
44
Boomerang throwing is not sufficient to ensure the media will cover the story, however,
and activist success in this instance depends also on the media’s willingness and interest
to publish the story. The Western news media is more likely to catch boomerangs thrown
from some places than from others, even when boomerang conditions are the same, and
when the local boomerang-throwing activists are equally capable and tell equally
compelling stories.
The implications for scholarship on transnational activism are considerable. Up
until now, the focus in stage 1 has been on the supply of boomerangs – how hard activists
work, how skilled and media savvy they are, how dense are their networks, and what
kinds of information they proffer. The common understanding is that harder working and
more dedicated activists with denser global civil society ties, coupled with information
about terrible atrocities, are likely to throw more compelling boomerangs, and will
therefore attract more global attention. The hope is that attention will then be used against
offending governments in stage 2, though scholars readily acknowledge that boomerangs
are not always pitched back, and that domestic political conditions inside the offending
country can stymie impact when they are.101
For the most part, however, the existing IR scholarship has overlooked the
demand side of the process. Boomerang supply is not enough to ensure success in stage
1. Skilled activists can throw all the boomerangs they want, but unless some powerful
Western constituency catches and publicizes the boomerang, the information will not set
in motion the pressures necessary to make the boomerang have an effect, that is to change
the way governments treat their citizens. In short, activists need to do more than simply
101 Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999.
45
launch boomerangs to the West; they need their information to be purchased by Western
media or other consumers.
Second, our findings suggest that the Latin America experience has been unusual.
There, activists have been especially successful in throwing information boomerangs that
attract the attention of Western media sources, publics and governments. Hafner-Burton
and Ron102 argue that Latin American qualitative case studies have played an important
and perhaps defining role in the IR discipline’s early human rights scholarship, and
Sikkink103 suggests the same is true for Western human rights policymaking. Many of the
policy instruments now used to promote human rights compliance globally were first
developed through the boomerang process. Local and transnational advocates fought hard
to curb Latin American abuses, publicizing atrocities in the Western media and pushing
through legislative and policy changes in the U.S. and international arenas. The resulting
set of tried and tested policy tools include private and official fact-finding investigations,
“naming and shaming” through media exposure, legislative and policy linkage between
human rights and bilateral aid, and international sanctions of various kinds. The current
international policy toolbox, in other words, has been filled largely with lessons from
activism and intervention in Latin America, which began during the 1970s, and then
spread to other regions over the next twenty years.104
The unusual Latin American experience may, however, have exerted
disproportionate influence on processes of international human rights policymaking and
scholarship applied elsewhere. Policies appropriate to one place may have different or
little impact in other areas of the world, since different geographic locations have distinct
102 Hafner-Burton and Ron 2009. 103 Sikkink 2004. 104 Ball 2002.
46
state-society configurations due to varying patterns of economic development,
colonialism, and post-colonial politics. Yet it is precisely these relations that determine
patterns of respect for human rights and the vulnerability of states to international human
rights pressures. If the contemporary human rights policy toolkit is in fact best suited to
Latin America, might it in fact be less well suited, or even unsuited, to other places?
Have we misapplied the lessons of Latin America to Asia, the Middle East, and Africa?
Perhaps. And if we have misapplied lessons across regions, this may help explain
why large-N statistical research finds only limited evidence for the global efficacy of
standard human rights-promotion instruments outside of Latin America. Across the
world, many of the most widely used policy tools have little impact unless associated
with very particular domestic conditions, including regime transition or higher levels of
democracy.105 Even in Latin America the evidence suggests that “naming and shaming” -
one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of contemporary rights advocates – may
work only for a short while and for countries with strong economic ties to the global
North.106 There is little robust evidence, in other words, that the Latin American toolbox
works particularly or equally well in other places.
Finally, our findings raise an important question about the market for boomerangs
since September 11, 2001 – a question that we cannot answer here with any certainty.
This article provides reassuring evidence that countries able to throw stronger
boomerangs were associated with higher levels of Western human rights media coverage
during the 1980s and 1990s. But, less comforting, it also shows that the Western media
heavily covered Latin American’s abuses during these decades, and underreported on
105 Hafner-Burton and Ron 2009. 106 Franklin 2008.
47
equally terrible abuses in other countries, even where activists were just as able and likely
to launch boomerangs. In the post 9/11 world, does this imbalance continue, or has the
media shifted its attention to abuses in the Middle East, Asia, or countries with large
Islamic populations?
Our study cannot answer this question, but it does flag the possibility that human
rights advocates and activists in some parts of the world are more able to set the
boomerang process into motion – securing Western media attention on their causes – for
reasons entirely out of their own control or unrelated to their level of effort. Since 9/11,
the Latin American advantage may have waned, not because local activism has dwindled,
but because U.S. foreign policy interests in suppressing global terrorism have surged.
48
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0
0
01
1
12
2
23
3
3number of articles
num
ber
of a
rtic
les
number of articles1980
1980
19801985
1985
19851990
1990
19901995
1995
19952000
2000
2000year
year
yearPowerful West
Powerful West
Powerful WestWorld
World
World0
0
01
1
12
2
23
3
3number of articles
num
ber
of a
rtic
les
number of articles1980
1980
19801985
1985
19851990
1990
19901995
1995
19952000
2000
2000year
year
yearLatin America
Latin America
Latin AmericaWorld
World
World0
0
02
2
24
4
46
6
68
8
8number of articles
num
ber
of a
rtic
les
number of articles1980
1980
19801985
1985
19851990
1990
19901995
1995
19952000
2000
2000year
year
yearFormer Soviet Bloc
Former Soviet Bloc
Former Soviet Bloc World
World
World0
0
01
1
12
2
23
3
3number of articles
num
ber
of a
rtic
les
number of articles1980
1980
19801985
1985
19851990
1990
19901995
1995
19952000
2000
2000year
year
yearSub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan AfricaWorld
World
World0
0
01
1
12
2
23
3
3number of articles
num
ber
of a
rtic
les
number of articles1980
1980
19801985
1985
19851990
1990
19901995
1995
19952000
2000
2000year
year
yearAsia
Asia
AsiaWorld
World
World0
0
01
1
12
2
23
3
3number of articles
num
ber
of a
rtic
les
number of articles1980
1980
19801985
1985
19851990
1990
19901995
1995
19952000
2000
2000year
year
yearMiddle East/North Africa
Middle East/North Africa
Middle East/North AfricaWorld
World
World1980 to 2000
1980 to 2000
1980 to 2000Average Country Media Coverage of Human RightsAverage Country Media Coverage of Human Rights
Average Country Media Coverage of Human Rights
Table 1: Factors Influencing the Western Media's Explicit Human Rights Coverage, 1980-2000
Model 1 Model
2 Model 3 Model
4 Percent Change
Variables coef (SE) p>z coef
(SE) p>z coef (SE) p>z coef
(SE) p>z %
Average media lag1 0.280 *** 0.280 *** 0.430 *** 46.2 0.053 0.053 0.046 Powerful West -1.430 ** -1.150 ** -1.633 ** -68.3
reference group 0.570 0.430 0.550
Asia 0.910 -0.520 -0.698 * -0.859 * -49.4 0.661 0.323 0.288 0.395 Latin America 1.430 ** 215.4 0.570
reference group
Middle East and North Africa 0.612 -0.817 ** -0.579 * -0.959 * -42.9 0.589 0.259 0.262 0.410 Sub-Saharan Africa 0.827 -0.603 -0.568 -0.878 + -42.3 0.682 0.371 0.402 0.500 (Former) Soviet Bloc 0.979 -0.451 -0.448 -0.494 -33.2 0.600 0.299 0.495 Amnesty press releases 0.046 *** 0.046 *** 0.013 0.013 INGO ties 0.001 *** 0.001 *** 0.000 0.000 CIRI physical integrity abuses scale 0.229 *** 0.229 *** 0.041 0.041 CIRI free speech abuses scale -0.036 -0.036 0.123 0.123 Boomerang Throw 0.318 *** 0.188 ** 39.2 0.070 0.061 ODA, $US millions (log) -0.030 -0.030 -0.002 0.003 -0.6 0.046 0.046 0.054 0.054 Proximity to US -0.143 * -0.143 * -0.072 -0.100 -7.8 0.066 0.066 0.049 0.066 Polity IV -0.047 *** -0.047 *** -0.029 * -0.045 ** -2.8 0.015 0.015 0.013 0.018 Number of battle deaths 0.000 0.000 0.000 * 0.000 + 0 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 US military aid, $US millions (log) 0.065 + 0.065 + 0.026 0.032 2.5 0.036 0.036 0.040 0.045 GDP per capita, $US (log) 0.129 0.129 0.086 0.188 8.7 0.105 0.105 0.107 0.132 Size of national military, thousands (log) 0.210 + 0.210 + 0.211 + 0.263 + 24.2 0.127 0.127 0.127 0.142 Population, millions (log) 0.129 0.129 0.232 0.454 ** 23.7 0.158 0.158 0.153 0.175
Constant -4.762 *** -3.332 ** -3.256 ** -3.776 * 1.259 1.310 1.280 1.558
Wald x2 1225.75 *** 1225.75 *** 950.88 *** 691.35 *** N 2295 2295 2397 2335 2397
Number of Countries 143 143 148 142 148 !!! #ignificant at the -.--/ level. !! #ignificant at the -.-/ level. ! #ignificant at the -.-2 level. 3 #ignificant at the -./ level.
Table 2: Additional Factors Influencing the Western Media's Explicit Human Rights Coverage, 1980-2000
Model 5 Model
6 Model 7 Model
8 Model
9
Variables coef (SE) p>z coef
(SE) p>z coef (SE) p>z coef
(SE) p>z coef (SE) p>z
Average media lag1 0.386 *** 0.653 *** 0.301 *** 0.418 *** 0.430 *** 0.048 0.080 0.043 0.044 0.043 Post Cold War 0.849 *** 0.151 Powerful West -1.179 ** -0.953 -1.289 ** -2.603 *** 0.443 0.722 0.413 0.759 Asia -0.823 ** -0.866 * -0.716 * -0.732 0.289 0.361 0.336 0.506 Latin America
reference category
Middle East and North Africa -0.976 *** -1.913 *** -0.619 * -1.360 ** 0.281 0.505 0.289 0.481 Sub-Saharan Africa -0.812 * -1.655 ** -0.551 -1.335 ** 0.400 0.651 0.430 0.527
(Former) Soviet Bloc -0.891 ** -
27.000 *** -0.634 + -1.267 ** 0.303 1.079 0.336 0.460 Western Civilization -0.603 + 0.376 Latin American Civilization
reference category
African Civilization -0.780 + 0.408 Islamic Civilization -0.755 ** 0.279 Sino Civilization -0.979 ** 0.327 Hindu Civilization -1.235 *** 0.325 Orthodox Civilization -0.552 0.347 Buddhist Civilization -0.772 0.517 Japanese Civilization -0.820 + 0.482 Powerful West x Boomerang 0.605 + 0.357 Asia x Boomerang -0.011 0.157 Middle East and North Africa x Boomerang 0.344 + 0.188 Sub-Saharan Africa x Boomerang 0.393 * 0.165
(Former) Soviet Bloc x Boomerang 0.390 + 0.221 Boomerang Throw 0.346 *** 0.269 + 0.381 *** 0.119 0.322 *** 0.066 0.146 0.080 0.121 0.068 ODA, $US millions (log) -0.040 0.085 -0.076 -0.008 0.050 0.051 0.080 0.059 0.050 0.062 Proximity to US -0.088 -0.089 -0.077 + -0.046 -0.051 0.054 0.070 0.046 0.056 0.046 Polity IV -0.051 *** -0.050 + -0.051 *** -0.031 * -0.034 ** 0.014 0.028 0.014 0.013 0.014 Number of battle deaths 0.000 *** 0.000 *** 0.000 0.000 + 0.000 ** 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 US military aid, $US millions (log) 0.083 + 0.105 + 0.092 + 0.017 0.023 0.044 0.058 0.051 0.037 0.043 GDP per capita, $US (log) 0.048 0.197 0.035 0.105 0.036 0.107 0.153 0.113 0.100 0.097 Size of national military, thousands (log) 0.280 * 0.409 * 0.183 0.201 0.227 + 0.128 0.201 0.123 0.127 0.125 Population, millions (log) 0.160 -0.010 0.293 + 0.265 + 0.209 0.154 0.202 0.154 0.150 0.145
Constant -3.180 ** -4.906 ** -2.311 + -3.136 ** -3.261 ** 1.260 1.794 1.375 1.253 1.183
Wald x2 1051.85 *** 1322.34 *** 814.32 *** 1067.94 *** 1425.82 *** N 2397 905 1492 2397 2397
Number of Countries 148 119 148 148 148 !!! #ignificant at the -.--/ level. !! #ignificant at the -.-/ level. ! #ignificant at the -.-2 level. 3 #ignificant at the -./ level.
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