Human Rights

The treaties, norms, and conventions surrounding the notion of human rights increasingly play an important role in global affairs, and states are under more pressure than ever before to appear respectful of their populations' dignity and rights.^[37] In a sense, human rights norms represent the codification and dissemination of the rules and regulations produced by infrastructural power. Even if states do not actually wield infrastructural control over a given area, they feel pressured to use policing and law enforcement tactics, since that is what human rights norms require. Increased global human rights pressures are evident in the global media's

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use of the term. Between 1982 and 1994, for example, the Reuters World Service registered a 500 percent increase in stories with the words "human rights," while the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) registered a 600 percent increase. Other agencies, such as China's Xinhua's press service, witnessed even more dramatic growth.^[38] The number of international nongovernmental organizations dealing with human rights, moreover, is also on the increase. From only 33 such international groups in 1953, the numbers rose to 79 in 1983, and 168 a decade later.^[39]

These changes are reconfiguring the global normative environment, with important consequences for smaller but significant regional powers such as Serbia or Israel.^[40] Forced into a subordinate position vis-à-vis global (but often Western-dominated) rule makers, regional and local powers are obliged to take human rights into consideration.^[41] Semidemocracies such as Serbia, Israel, Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia also have vocal human rights organizations of their own, lending global norms even greater domestic resonance. Local and global human rights activists often collaborate, infusing one another with information, resources, and legitimacy.^[42] In these cases, global human rights norms and norms of domestic infrastructural power are mutually reinforcing. These two sources of restraint in heavily institutionalized settings—domestic infrastructural power and international human rights norms—are analytically distinct but mutually reinforcing.