Alexander Cooley
It is no secret that, over the last decade, Beijing and Moscow have become more vocal in their questioning of the value of liberal democracy and universal political rights. Once defensive about their political values following the Soviet collapse, they are now emboldened geopolitically and actively seek to undermine liberalism as part of their challenge to U.S. global leadership and the normative fabric of the U.S.-led international order. Internationally, China and Russia have promoted new counternorms that oppose universal rights by invoking sovereignty and security, the notion of civilizational diversity, and the importance of “traditional values.”[1] They have used their “sharp power” to target opinion-forming institutions and spheres within the West—such as the media, academia, and think-tanks—that have criticized their actions and normative practices.[2] Moreover, they have also engaged in a far broader and deeper revisionism that seeks to disrupt, contest, and ultimately transform the multilateral governance architectures on which much of the human rights regime relies.
Policymakers and scholars alike have been conditioned to view certain institutions, networks, and global actors as inherently supporting the liberal human rights framework.[3] For example, we tend to regard international bodies as upholders—at least officially—of human rights commitments, regional groupings such as the European Union (EU) and their supranational secretariats as committed to liberal standards and values, and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) as important agents and drivers of principled advocacy. But as Dan Nexon and I have recently argued more broadly, our system of global governance is already characterized by a mix of liberal and illiberal ordering norms, institutions, and actors.[4] Many of the intergovernmental organizations and institutional forms once associated with liberal global governance have been repurposed to support illiberal policies.
This chapter identifies and discusses three key transformations of this kind, led by China and Russia, in the contemporary architecture of global governance. First, these two states have led the way in founding new security and economic regional organizations—especially across Eurasia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—whose mission values and practices clearly conflict with, and now actively undercut, basic liberal principles and international human rights protections. Second, Beijing and Moscow have also repurposed the operations and organizational culture of major existing international and regional organizations, watering down their work on human rights–related issues or influencing them to adopt viewpoints and declarations that align with authoritarian practices. Third, China and Russia have successfully recast many of the human rights–related NGOs as “security threats” and curtailed their activities, while replacing them in regional and international forums with government-sponsored nongovernmental organizations (GONGOs). Taken together, these transformations in global governance have both challenged the efficacy and impact of traditional advocacy networks and introduced new counternetworks that promote illiberal values at the global level.
Advocates and policymakers have been slow to recognize the sustained challenge that this counterordering entails. It is a challenge that will not simply fizzle out or depend on which country gains the upper hand in this era of renewed “Great Power Competition.”[5] Rather, advocates of political liberalism and the human rights regime will have to step up and confront large swaths of illiberal order, now ensconced in the fabric of global governance, that were previously neglected or just diplomatically ignored.
The New Regional Organizations
Over the last two decades Moscow and Beijing have launched a series of new regional organizations in the economic, political, and security spheres. Membership of these bodies tends to be concentrated in the immediate neighborhood of Russia and China, namely Eurasia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).[6] Of course, the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—could also be counted as a joint China-Russia initiative with the more global ambition of increasing their agenda-setting capacity on global governance-related issues and enabling their voices to be heard.[7]
Although these new regional organizations were initially dismissed as marginal or even mimetic actors not worthy of international recognition or Western engagement, their proliferation has transformed the ecology of global governance. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, the overwhelming consensus among scholars of international relations and regionalism was that regional integration helped to support democratic principles and practice.[8] As both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) prepared in the late 1990s for an unprecedented expansion of membership, they developed a set of criteria and body of legislation known as “membership conditionality” that all aspirant countries had to adopt before entry.[9] Many of these conditions sought to promote democratic practices and promote human rights, including the rights of minorities, media freedoms, and freedom of association. Scholars remained divided over whether EU or NATO conditionality actually worked through genuine socialization rather than the material incentives of membership, but few expressed doubts at the time that expansion and accession would help to lock in and institutionalize democratic norms and practices.[10]
However, the last two decades have challenged the assumption that regionalism or more regional integration would inherently promote democratic values and political rights, especially in non-Western settings. The SCO, CSTO, EAEU, and similar organizations appear to mimic the form of Western counterparts such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) or the EU, but they have different practices and common norms.[11] New research and scholarship, particularly into the dynamics of regional organizations in the former Soviet space, have explored how regional organizations and intergovernmentalism can be used by governments to facilitate authoritarian learning and reciprocity about undemocratic practices. The key point in much of this literature is to draw attention to the needs of authoritarian regimes. Rather than using regional organizations to facilitate gains in overall welfare for their countries’ economies or particular economic sectors—such as those that result from removing barriers to trade and creating a common economic space—autocrats use such bodies to secure themselves from domestic and external threats and the erosion of their authority, and at times to advance authoritarian leaders elsewhere. Regime security trumps pareto-maximizing economic agreements.[12] Regionalism not only offers material pathways—such as facilitating side payments and the provision of public goods from richer authoritarians to smaller states—in return for compliance, but also creates new normative contexts that justify and promote authoritarianism.[13] Member states of authoritarian-leaning organizations, in turn, can use regionalism and invoke regional solidarity as a basis for rejecting universal norms that are politically disruptive, and for upholding member state sovereignty. On point, in early January 2022, Russia dispatched troops to Kazakhstan under the CSTO intervention mechanism at the request of Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.[14] Tokayev faced mass antigovernment street protests and an attempted power grab by allies linked to former president Nursultan Nazarbayev; the CSTO’s intervention signaled to the Kazakh security services that Moscow backed the embattled Kazakh president and his heavy-handed crackdown that resulted in 225 deaths and thousands of arrests.[15]
The SCO has facilitated China’s security agenda, as seen most obviously in its adoption of the Chinese-inspired security norm of combating the “three evils” of separatism, terrorism, and extremism.[16] At the same time, as Tom Ambrosio has shown, the organization officially invokes a common norm of the so-called Shanghai Spirit, which critiques universal understandings of political community (such as liberal democracy), promotes civilizational diversity and respect for member state sovereignty, and calls for the democratization of international relations—understood as a retrenchment in the role of the United States and its liberal agenda.[17] The SCO has also actively promoted, under the auspices of its Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure, a number of regional security practices that contravene human rights norms, including maintaining common blacklists of extreme organizations and individuals that also ensnare political opponents and dissidents. Not surprisingly, the United Nations Rapporteur on Human Rights and Terrorism expressed concern about the criteria used in these listing practices and the lack of clear criteria by which individuals or groups could challenge their status or de-list themselves.[18]
In the name of security, the SCO also appears to have authorized new regional-level legal practices and violations of international human rights obligations. Take the SCO’s Anti-Terrorism Treaty, established in 2009. In combating the “three evils” denoted above, the treaty allows for suspects to be transferred from the custody of one member state to another with minimum evidence, denies the accused a political asylum hearing, and permits member states to “dispatch their agents to the territory” of a fellow member state for up to thirty days when conducting a criminal investigation.[19] Legal experts with the OSCE have criticized the vague and subjective designation of what constitutes “extremism” or “separatism,” while noting that the convention does not give any guidance or procedures on how its provisions should be enforced in accordance with existing human rights frameworks or legal protections.[20] According to several human rights organizations, the SCO security treaty has been used to justify a number of politically motivated political renditions and abductions, including sending Central Asian dissidents back to their home countries and transferring Uyghurs and Falun Gong members from Russia and Central Asia to China.[21] These new regional laws seem to conflict openly with international obligations. For example, Kazakhstani prosecutors cited the SCO accords to justify the extradition of twenty-nine political asylum seekers to Uzbekistan, a country notorious for using torture. But a subsequent communication from the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) found that the Kazakh authorities had violated the CAT’s nonrefoulement obligation.[22]
In addition to offering a regional space and legal context to promote illiberal practices among host governments, the cooperative institutions of these regional organizations also appear to be aiding and abetting illiberal practices. One example is the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), charged with fostering legal harmonization among member states. Using antiplagiarism software that compares original and disseminated texts, researchers found that the regional body has played a critical role in disseminating to the smaller Central Asian states a range of legislation adopted by the Russian Federation that restricts peaceful assembly, curtails the activities of NGOs, and broadly defines the activities and financing of terrorism and extremism.[23] Overall, the authors find that Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were especially likely to import whole tracts of legislation of Russian law into their own criminal codes. For example, 47 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Council’s laws and 48 percent of laws passed by Tajikistan’s legislative body directly copied the Russian version. The authors conclude that “Russia acts as an ‘authoritarian gravity centre’ defining the policy agenda and facilitating cooperation to harmonize laws through the CIS-IPA [Commonwealth of Independent States-Interparliamentary Assembly].” Unlike the international parliamentary assemblies of established democratic membership organizations, that of the CIS appears to be functioning as an agent of illiberal convergence.
Repurposing International Organizations
Beyond just establishing new regional organizations with new norms and practices that run counter to human rights standards, Beijing and Moscow are more assertively setting agendas and trying to influence the activities of existing international bodies. The COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to how Beijing successfully tipped the outcome of the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) prior leadership contest toward its preferred candidate, while the WHO on multiple occasions backed off from criticizing China’s own reaction to the pandemic and its information-sharing practices. China itself leads four of the UN’s fifteen bodies and exerts increasing influence in nearly all of them.[24]
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has been an arena for these new geopolitical battles over human rights norms and agendas. Russia has been increasingly involved in transnational efforts to push back on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) agenda—often in cooperation with U.S.-based evangelical movements, as explored in chapter 7 by Melani McAlister—under the guise of promoting “religious freedom” or defending traditional values. For example, the body voted in 2009 for the Russian-led effort to promote “traditional values” and in 2014 for another Russian-sponsored initiative designed to “protect the family,” a clear affront to the recognition of LGBTQ rights.
In July 2019, the UNHRC revealed the extent of Beijing’s new-found influence. A group of twenty-two countries drafted a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights accusing China of using its internment camp network to conduct “mass arbitrary detentions and related violations” and destroy the Uyghurs’ indigenous culture and religious way of life;[25] the signatories comprised core countries and groupings usually associated with the liberal international community including the United Kingdom, the EU, the Nordic countries, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. However, just a few weeks later, China countered by mobilizing thirty-seven countries—mostly drawn from across the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eurasia—to sign a letter stating: “Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers.”[26] Their letter also commended Beijing for “its remarkable achievements in the field of human rights” and expressed appreciation for “China’s commitment to openness and transparency.”[27] United Nations Secretary General António Guterres was himself criticized by human rights watchdogs for his reluctance to criticize the detention centers.[28]
Even several of the international organizations associated with strong mandates promoting human rights in the immediate post–Cold War era have seemingly curtailed their activity related to human rights and norms, or have witnessed new internal divisions that have eroded unanimity and consensus on such issues. Consider the evolution of the OSCE, the post–Cold War successor to the détente-era Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE).[29] Comprising all of the countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union, the OSCE was founded with the “human dimension,” which embodied the promotion of liberal democratic values and norms, as one of its central pillars. In the 1990s, it was involved in postconflict reconciliation and state-building in areas such as the Balkans and the Caucasus, while it actively promoted minority rights and freedom of expression across the postcommunist region. However, as Russia and many of the former Soviet states have openly moved to criticize and then reject liberal democratic values, the OSCE’s human dimension has become scrutinized and its projects curtailed or defunded. Although the bureaucracy still tries to maneuver against such backlash among member countries, the organization’s human dimension portfolio has become very sparse indeed, focusing mostly on countering human trafficking.
This is clear, for example, in the area of election monitoring. After the OSCE’s election observation body, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), criticized the quality of nearly every national election in Eurasia in the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia, along with Belarus and the Central Asian states, proposed a number of “reforms” to gut its autonomy and ability to criticize and conduct substantial long-term monitoring missions.[30] In addition, the field of election monitoring became crowded and its findings contested, as other private and public groups also began to monitor elections, with methods that were less rigorous and findings that were more supportive of authoritarian governments.[31] Indeed, many of these new observation teams come from regional organizations such as the SCO or the CIS. By 2020 the ODIHR itself appeared marginalized in its Election-Day assessments. For example, when the OSCE heavily criticized the election of Tokayev, the interim president of Kazakhstan in 2019, he responded by dismissing the OSCE as “just one of the international organisations [monitoring the vote],” and saying that “we should not focus on the assessment of this particular organisation.”[32]
Even the European Union has struggled to retain consensus on the human rights record, especially regarding China. Those smaller European states that have actively courted Chinese investment, especially through the Belt and Road Initiative, appear more reluctant to issue public condemnatory statements on this issue. For example, in June 2017 Greece blocked a statement condemning China’s human rights practices, the first time, according to human rights watchdogs, that the EU has failed to issue a statement at the UNHRC.[33] The Greek foreign minister commented that the statement amounted to “unconstructive criticism of China;” the Greek government had just secured a large investment by a Chinese logistics company to upgrade the port of Piraeus. Similarly, in April 2021 Hungary blocked a planned EU statement criticizing Hong Kong’s new security law, in solidarity with the United Kingdom and the United States—a move that German foreign minister Heiko Maas described as “absolutely incomprehensible.”[34] After a phone call with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Chinese president Xi Jinping lauded the controversial Hungarian leader for “safeguarding overall China-European relations.”
True, a plausible case can be made that, to some extent, the United Nations has always been an arena for competing normative agendas. And despite its problems on China-related issues, the European Union has achieved consensus on maintaining sanctions on Russia following the annexation of Crimea, despite forecasts that European unity might not withstand Moscow’s divide-and-rule tactics. But as a result of these geopolitical shifts, the existing multilateral organizations that we have assumed lie at the core of the international human rights regime are far more contested now than in the 1990s.
From NGOs to GONGOs
The third recent key transformation has been a shift in the types of “nonstate” actors operating transnationally. While the 1990s saw a global explosion in the number of NGOs and human rights defenders, in the following two decades, with active intervention by Moscow and Beijing, NGOs worldwide suffered a wave of new restrictions on their activities, registration, and sources of funding.[35] In the case of the Russian Federation, Moscow directly criminalized membership of a series of Western-supported “undesirable organizations.”[36] The response has been the widespread rise of government-supported NGOs. Driven by savvy regimes that seek to preserve the appearance of civil society but quell actual political opposition, these GONGOs help shape narratives about the state’s responsiveness to public policy by displacing civil society actors. They increasingly interface with external actors such as international organizations, donors, and the media, and even consume valuable time and resources in global spaces once reserved for NGOs, such as the OSCE’s annual Human Dimension Implementation Meetings (HDIMs) in Warsaw.
GONGOs do not only present and defend viewpoints endorsed by governments, their presence overseas as emissaries of “civil society” crowds international forums designed as civil society dialogues and fuels the transnational contestation about ideas of what constitutes acceptable human rights practices and standards. These international activities appear to have intensified in recent years. Following its annexation of Crimea, Russia has flooded international events with GONGOs, such as the Foundation for Historical Perspective or Diaspora of Bulgarians in Crimea, to dispute Ukrainian-led criticisms of the legality of the annexation, the status of minority rights, and the clampdown on media freedoms enacted by the Kremlin.[37] Such vocal activists are part of a broad network of state-funded “Russian World” actors, foundations, and media and cultural groups designed to shape overseas public opinion about Russian actions within the countries of the post-Soviet states and even the West itself.[38] Similarly, Central Asian governments—especially Tajikistan’s—have been criticized for “taking up space” at the OSCE’s HDIM as well as actually intimidating human rights defenders, exiles, and dissidents attending or speaking at the conference in Warsaw.[39]
Within the UN’s Universal Periodic Review process, China and Russia have sought to resurrect and ally with the Like-Minded Group (LMG), comprising fifty-two states of the developing world, to push back on excessive involvement by independent NGOs and promote the uncritical statements made by GONGOs in support of governments during their Universal Periodic Review. In addition, at various UN meetings and in preparation for them, China has used GONGOs to systematically harass members of civil society groups critical of Chinese human rights policies toward the Uyghurs, Tibet, or Hong Kong.[40] As Human Rights Watch notes in its report on China’s subversion of the UN human rights mechanism, UN officials and staffers have responded only weakly to these intimidation tactics as China’s influence within the UN continues to grow.
A World of Contested and Contending
Transnational Networks
During the 1990s, scholars and policymakers identified transnational activist networks as an important phenomenon in international relations, allowing NGOs and global civil society to spread universal values via networks of like-minded allies and advocates. The liberal transnational network structure—premised both on American primacy and the uncontested hegemony of liberal norms in global governance—was also key to understanding how activism operated to mobilize allies and name and shame recalcitrant states. In their seminal book on transnational activist networks, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink argued that the flexible structure of the network empowered activists to pressure human rights and norms violators by allowing activists to “boomerang,” forging tactical coalitions with like-minded actors in international and regional organizations, other NGOs, and influential allied states in a manner that would rebound on governments and pressure them to uphold international norms such as human rights treaty commitments.[41] Even at the time, this influential theory of change was analytically challenged. Some scholars pointed to the material motivations driving the transnational sector,[42] while others astutely observed that individual gatekeepers at international organizations played an important role in deciding which rights-related issues were worthy of an international campaign.[43]
Beyond these critiques, the geopolitical trends identified in this chapter—the establishment of new regional organizations, the refashioning of traditionally liberal bodies, and the rise of GONGOs at the expense of NGOs—are transforming the ecology of international order and altering how such transnationalism operates in practice. In short, Chinese and Russian global governance is challenging and complicating the “boomerang” process once used by activists to support liberal causes, as well as introducing new transnational counternetworks that seek—much like their liberal counterparts—to disseminate norms and values across borders, but in this case illiberal ones.
Consider how such a boomerang effect might function in a situation where the target state, engaged in blatant illiberal practices such as gross human rights violations, also has allies throughout the global governance chain, including across other states, in the leadership of international and regional organizations, and among sympathetic transnational actors that support or justify their illiberal practices. “Boomeranging” would itself become competitive, as both liberal activists and illiberal governments would seek to mobilize transnational allies in support of their specific positions. Such a dynamic appears to characterize the current campaign surrounding Chinese policies in Xinjiang.
In response to the activism of transnational Uygur rights groups and their Western supporters, China has enlisted state allies to support its position (as evidenced at the HCR) and has aggressively sought to mobilize commercial allies in public opposition to a related campaign to ban the use of Xinjiang-produced cotton. In 2019 Chinese state media banned the showing of National Basketball Association (NBA) games in response to critical comments about Xinjiang made by the general manager of the Houston Rockets, while the Chinese market remains a key source of revenue for NBA players and celebrities with ties to Chinese clothing manufacturers.[44] And the recent public embrace of Xinjiang cotton by the Japanese manufacturer Muji suggests that China’s significant market power and leverage have become critical sources of support for undercutting the Xinjiang boycott globally.[45]
At the same time, new transnational networks that promote illiberal values are emerging wholesale. Just like their original liberal counterparts, these networks are united in their principles (opposing universal liberalism) and seek to link activists, social groups (religious, government-sponsored youth groups and ethnonational organizations), regional organizations, and allied state governments. Consider, for instance, the evolution and current activities of the World Congress of Families (WCF) (also discussed in Melani McAlister’s chapter). The WCF was initially founded in the 1990s in the United States by two organizations of the Christian right, but has since expanded and globalized its work. For the last decade, it has been especially involved in the postcommunist space and has received funding and political support from Eurasian oligarchs and government-affiliated groups.[46] It presents itself as a transnational counter to the Soros-backed Open Society and holds annual plenary conferences that seek to promote an antiliberal advocacy including an agenda that is anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ, antireproductive rights, and “anti-globalist.” The sessions held in Budapest, Hungary, and Chisinau, Moldova (both in 2018), also featured laudatory keynote speeches delivered by the host state’s head of government. The WCF also actively liaises with conservative governments and campaigns for its agenda in institutions such as the HCR.
Conclusions and Policy Recommendations
A world in which we can no longer assume that networks of global governance will function to support the human rights regime requires some bold action on behalf of governments, human rights defenders, and foundations. I propose the following four approaches:
1. Pursue comprehensive engagement with new regional bodies. Rather than debating the merits of “limited engagement” with these new regional organizations, Western officials should consider the merits of comprehensive engagement. Only engaging with groups like the SCO or CSTO about specific issues (e.g., the security situation in Afghanistan) confers both status and legitimacy on these new bodies but does nothing to challenge either their dissemination of counternorms or their counterordering activities. In other words, discussion of normative issues should not be bypassed but form part of any efforts to establish dialogues and cooperation. Advocates of the liberal order should press leaders from regional organizations, in the context of interorganizational engagement, to show how certain practices (political asylum protections, election observation standards) align with international treaty commitments and best practices. Indeed, rather than refusing to engage with non-Western regional organizations such as the SCO or the EAEU, thereby allowing the expansion of illiberal networking, Western groups such as the EU or NATO should embrace comprehensive engagement with their illiberal counterparts.
2. Be prepared to pick sides domestically. The rise of new illiberal transnational networks mirrors the rise of intense political polarization in the United States and Poland and other countries where liberal and illiberal norms are now openly pitted against each other in intense new culture wars with important social policy ramifications. As a result, viewing international policy or global governance as a separate sphere, detached from domestic politics, is no longer viable. Administrations that seek to promote human rights norms and protections must actively support and network with like-minded governments and political parties in the context of routine diplomacy, while drawing attention to illiberal political platforms and practices.
3. Human rights donors should rescale globally. This recommendation flows from the nature of this new transnational contestation. It is almost a mantra that support for human rights defenders should be channeled to local organizations, activists, and legal offices; and this should remain an important priority of major human rights work and international funders. However, it is no longer possible to ignore the transnational and global dimensions in which this backlash against human rights norms is taking place. The networking of far-right movements that share illiberal values presents a fundamental challenge to the values and advocacy strategies of human rights defenders. Funders should consider providing more support for the investigation of these transnational links, including their funding ties, their elite networks, and their media and information campaigns; and they should support investigative journalism into their evolution and international conferences and meetings.
4. Reforming the UNHRC. Finally, steps should be taken to reform the UNHRC to make it less susceptible to capture by authoritarians. Membership eligibility should be tightened to exclude countries under active UN sanction, and proposed nominations should be subjected to a period of public discussion, involving expert and NGO testimony, which would include a public review of the human rights record of candidate countries prior to their election. Membership should be made conditional on avoiding interference in the activities of NGOs and civil society engaged with the body.
Notes
1. Alexander Cooley, “Authoritarianism Goes Global: Countering Democratic Norms,” Journal of Democracy 26, 3 (2015), pp, 49–63.
2. Christopher Walker, “What Is ‘Sharp Power’?,” Journal of Democracy 29, 3 (2018), pp. 9–23.
3. For example, see Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, “The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms,” in The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, edited by Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–38; and Thomas Pegram, “Diffusion across Political Systems: The Global Spread of National Human Rights Institutions,” Human Rights Quarterly 32 (2010), pp. 729–60. For a critique of such initial optimistic post–Cold War accounts, see Stephen Hopgood, Jack Snyder, and Leslie Vinjamuri (eds.), Human Rights Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
4. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, “The Illiberal Tide: Why the International Order Is Tilting towards Autocracy,” Foreign Affairs, March 26, 2021, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-03-26/illiberal-tide.
5. Daniel Nexon, “Against Great Power Competition,” Foreign Affairs, February 15, 2021, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-15/against-great-power-competition.
6. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 4.
7. Cynthia A. Roberts, Leslie Elliott Armijo, and Saori N. Katada, The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2018).
8. See Jon Pevehouse, Democracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Jon Pevehouse, “With a Little Help from My Friends? Regional Organizations and the Consolidation of Democracy,” American Journal of Political Science 46, 3 (2002), pp. 611–26.
9. On EU and NATO conditionality and its impact on domestic politics, see Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism (Oxford University Press, 2005).
10. Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, “Governance by Conditionality: EU Rule Transfer to the Candidate Countries of Central and Eastern Europe,” Journal of European Public Policy 11, 4 (2004), pp. 661–79; Alexandra Gheciu, NATO in the “New Europe”: The Politics of International Socialization after the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 2005); and Judith Kelley, “International Actors on the Domestic Scene: Membership Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions,” International Organization 58, 3 (2004), pp. 425–57.
11. David Lewis, “Who’s Socialising Whom? Regional Organisations and Contested Norms in Central Asia,” Europe-Asia Studies 64, 7 (2012), pp. 1219–37.
12. On the peculiar logic of regional integration and patrimonial regimes, see Kathleen Collins, “Economic and Security Regionalism among Patrimonial Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Central Asia,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, 2 (2009), pp. 249–81.
13. See especially, Alexander Libman and Anastassia Obydenkova, “Regional International Organizations as a Strategy of Autocracy: The Eurasian Economic Union and Russian Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 94, 5 (2018), pp. 1037–58; and Alexander Libman and Anastassia Obydenkova, “Understanding Authoritarian Regionalism,” Journal of Democracy 29, 4 (2018), pp. 151–65.
14. Alexander Cooley, “Kazakhstan Called for Assistance. Why Did Russia Dispatch Troops so Quickly?” Washington Post, January 9, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/09/kazakhstan-called-assistance-why-did-russia-dispatch-troops-so-quickly/.
15. Kate Mallinson, “Tokayev Faces Double Challenge in Kazakhstan,” Chatham House, January 14, 2022, https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/01/tokayev-faces-double-challenge-troubled-kazakhstan.
16. Stephen Aris, “The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation:‘Tackling the Three Evils’: A Regional Response to Non-Traditional Security Challenges or an Anti-Western Bloc?,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, 3 (2009), pp. 457–82.
17. Thomas Ambrosio, “Catching the ‘Shanghai Spirit’: How the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Promotes Authoritarian Norms in Central Asia,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, 8 (2008), pp. 1321–44.
18. OHCHR, UN Human Rights Council, 10th Session. A/HRC/10/3 4 February 2009, www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/terrorism/rapporteur/docs/A.HRC.10.3.pdf; para. 35.
19. Available at Shanghai Cooperation Organization Secretariat, “Convention of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Against Terrorism,” March 2009, http://eng.sectsco.org/documents/.
20. Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), “Note on the Shanghai Convention on Combatting Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism,” Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, September 21, 2020, www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/8/467697.pdf.
21. See International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), “Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: A Vehicle for Human Rights Violations,” 2012, www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/sco_report.pdf; “Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights: The Impact of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” Human Rights in China, March 2011, www.hrichina.org/en/search/site/SCO%20human%20rights.
22. Human Rights Watch, “Kazakhstan: Don’t Extradite Uzbeks to Torture,” June 7, 2011, www.hrw.org/news/2011/06/07/kazakhstan-dont-extradite-uzbeks-torture.
23. Edward Lemon and Oleg Antonov, “Authoritarian Legal Harmonization in the Post-Soviet Space,” Democratization 27, 7 (2020), pp. 1221–39.
24. Kristine Lee, “It’s Not Just the WHO: How China Is Moving on the Whole U.N.,” Politico, April 5, 2020, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/15/its-not-just-the-who-how-china-is-moving-on-the-whole-un-189029; and Courtney J. Fung and Shing-Hon Lam, “China Already Leads 4 of the 15 UN Specialized Agencies and Is Aiming for a 5th,” Washington Post, March 3, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/03/china-already-leads-4-15-un-specialized-agencies-is-aiming-5th/.
25. “22 Countries Sign Letter Calling on China to Close Xinjiang Uyghur Camps,” CNN, July 11, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/asia/xinjiang-uyghur-un-letter-intl-hnk.
26. Joyce Huang, “UN Human Rights Council Divided over China’s Xinjiang Policies,” VOA News, July 17, 2019, www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/un-human-rights-council-divided-over-chinas-xinjiang-policies.
27. UN Human Rights Council, 41st Session, August 9, 2019, A/HRC/41/G/17, https://ap.ohchr.org/Documents/E/HRC/c_gov/A_HRC_41_G_17.DOCX.
28. Human Rights Watch, “UN Chief Should Denounce China’s Abuses in Xinjiang,” September 17, 2019, www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/17/un-chief-should-denounce-chinas-abuses-xinjiang.
29. Rick Fawn, International Organizations and Internal Conditionality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
30. Rick Fawn, “Battle over the Box: International Election Observation Missions, Political Competition and Retrenchment in the Post-Soviet Space,” International Affairs 82, 6 (2006), pp. 1133–53.
31. Judith Kelley, “The More the Merrier? The Effects of Having Multiple International Election Monitoring Organizations,” Perspectives on Politics (February 12, 2009), pp. 59–64.
32. “Nazarbayev’s Hand-Picked Successor Tokayev Elected Kazakh President,” Reuters, June 10, 2019, www.reuters.com/article/us-kazakhstan-election/nazarbayevs-handpicked-successor-tokayev-elected-kazakh-president-idUSKCN1TB0JA.
33. “Greece Blocks EU Statement on China Human Rights at the UN,” Reuters, June 18, 2017, www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-un-rights/greece-blocks-eu-statement-on-china-human-rights-at-u-n-idUSKBN1990FP.
34. Finbarr Bermingham, “Germany ‘Has All the Tools’ to Whip Hungary into Line on Hong Kong, but Does It Really Want To?,” South China Morning Post, May 12, 2021, www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3133097/germany-has-all-tools-whip-hungary-line-hong-kong-does-it.
35. See Patricia Bromley, Evan Schofer, and Wesley Longhofer, “Contentions over World Culture: The Rise of Legal Restrictions on Foreign Funding to NGOs, 1994–2015,” Social Forces 99, 1 (2020), pp. 281–304; and Darin Christensen and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Defunding Dissent: Restrictions on Aid to NGOs,” Journal of Democracy 24, 2 (2013), pp. 77–91.
36. Sergei Davidis, “Russia’s ‘Undesirable Organization’ Law Marks a New Level of Repression,” Wilson Center (blog), April 12, 2019, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/russias-undesirable-organization-law-marks-new-level-repression.
37. See Orysia Lutsevych, “Agents of the Russian World: Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighborhood,” Chatham House, April 2016, www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publications/research/2016-04-14-agents-russian-world-lutsevych-embargoed.pdf; Ron Synovitz, “Attack of the GONGOs: Government Organized NGOs Attack Warsaw Meeting,” RFE/RL, September 19, 2019, www.rferl.org/a/attack-of-the-gongos-government-organized-ngos-flood-warsaw-meeting/30191944.html.
38. Lutsevych, “Agents of the Russian World.”
39. Synovitz, “Attack of the GONGOs.”
40. Rana Siu Inboden, “China at the UN; Choking Civil Society,” Journal of Democracy 32, 3 (July 2021), pp. 124–35; Human Rights Watch, The Costs of International Advocacy: China’s Interference in United Nations Human Rights Mechanisms (New York, 2017), www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/chinaun0917_web.pdf.
41. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Cornell University Press, 1998).
42. Alexander Cooley and James Ron, “The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action,” International Security 27, 1 (2002), pp. 5–39; and Clifford Bob, “Merchants of Morality,” Foreign Policy (2002), pp. 36–45.
43. Charli Carpenter, “Setting the Advocacy Agenda: Theorizing Issue Emergence and Nonemergence in Transnational Advocacy Networks,” International Studies Quarterly 51, 1 (2007), pp. 99–120.
44. Alexander Stevenson, “China’s Forced Labor Backlash Threatens to Put NBA in Unwanted Spotlight,” New York Times, April 12, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/business/china-nba-anta-xinjiang.html.
45. Megumi Fujikawa, “Japan’s Muji Appeals to China by Advertising Use of Xinjiang Cotton,” Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/japans-muji-appeals-to-china-by-advertising-use-of-xinjiang-cotton-11620692294.
46. See Kristina Stoeckl, “The Rise of the Russian Christian Right: The Case of the World Congress of Families,” Religion, State and Society 48, 4 (2020), pp. 223–38.
