United Nations endorsement and support for human rights: an experiment on women’s rights in Pakistan

Author Affiliation

Gulnaz Anjum is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts, Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Was this content written or created while at IBA?

Yes

Document Type

Article

Source Publication

Journal of Peace Research

ISSN

0022-3433

Disciplines

International Relations | Political Science | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology

Abstract

The United Nations is one of the organizations charged with developing and promoting international human rights law. One of the primary ways that the United Nations tries to do that is by regularly reviewing the human rights practices of member states and then recommending new policies for that state to implement. Although this expends considerable resources, a number of obstacles have made it difficult to empirically assess whether the UN’s review process actually causes countries to improve their human rights practices. To study this topic, we conducted an experiment in Pakistan that tested whether respondents were more likely to support policies aimed at improving women’s rights when they learned that the reforms were proposed by the United Nations. Our results indicate that the respondents who were randomly informed of the United Nations endorsement not only expressed higher support for the policy reforms, but also were more likely to express willingness to ‘mobilize’ in ways that would help the reforms be implemented. Our treatment did not have any effect, however, on respondents that did not already have confidence in the United Nations. This suggests that the international human rights regime may only be able to aid domestic reformers when there is already faith in those institutions.

Indexing Information

HJRS - W Category, Scopus, Web of Science - Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)

Journal Quality Ranking

Impact Factor: 4.054

Publication Status

Published

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