Mobilizing “Third-Party Influence”: The Impact of Amnesty International’s Naming and Shaming

Over the past 35 years, human rights international nongovernmental organizations (international NGOs or INGOs) have extensively used “naming and shaming” for social change around the world. Human rights INGOs engage in so-called “third-party influence” (Cmiel 1999), offering information to Western governments, international organizations (IOs), and the global mass media, and seeking to mobilize these powerful third parties to pressure rights-violating target governments. Amnesty International (AI) has been the world’s most powerful human rights INGO, which routinely utilizes the mobilization of third-party influence. However, do AI’s methods, particularly its special country reports, actually improve human rights practices in dictatorships, that is, where the mobilization of external pressure is needed most for domestic social change? If so, under what conditions?