ABSTRACT
This book is fundamentally about justice and hope. It sprang from the conviction that, if more people knew what was really going on in foreign policymaking, and how the policies of democratic states can sometimes actually lead to bad practices elsewhere, they would demand better behavior from their governments. I had read the powerful arguments made by Chomsky and Hermann (1978) about the ‘Washington connection’ and human rights abuse abroad, and they rang true to me, but I wanted evidence. So, clearly, did others. The last three decades have seen increasingly sophisticated empirical work in the policy community and the academic literature addressing the question of how and when rights matter to policy-makers. Increasingly these investigators are asking a harder question: ‘when do they really matter?’ These have built on earlier rich descriptive work on the stances of policy-makers2 and used the increasingly nuanced quantitative data on foreign policy outcomes to determine how much states’ foreign policy-makers really support – in measurable ways – what their formal and informal policy statements say they support. Through the growing pastiche of nuanced case studies and statistical analyses, we are beginning to triangulate on real answers to these questions about the ethical meanings of foreign relations – perhaps the most important questions in international politics.
