Cooperating Rivals: The Riparian Politics of the Jordan River Basin

(elite discourses, the public, and the legal system). In the case of Japan, such an in-depth exploration would have paid greater attention to the government’s overall goal of raising its profile in the United Nations and attaining a permanent seat in the Security Council. In the United States, exploring the reasons for not joining CEDAW provides fertile grounds for drawing on interest group and institutionalist accounts in order to develop more confident predictions about the relative importance of the different mechanisms across a diversity of nations. Not only would this have given the study a stronger footing in comparative politics, but it might also have created additional benefits for human rights activists who want to learn more about the kinds of strategies that are most likely to produce success in a given domestic environment. Treaties and states are certainly central to human rights change, but Simmons’s approach also largely forces her to ignore the increasing relevance of nonstate actors and the question of how to effectively protect rights in situations where governments lack even a basic capacity to live up to their international obligations. While governments may well be willing to increase the recruitment age for their military (pp. 339–40), today’s more significant threat to children is rogue rebels whose behavior is not likely to be affected by international law. But even in her analysis on the role of transnational civil society groups, Simmons does not push for systematic claims linking the external to the domestic, let alone an agency that actually facilitates the diffusion of those norms in the first place (transnational nongovernmental organizations, a United Nations committee, etc.). Many transnational NGOs working in the humanitarian and development area have only recently adopted an explicit rights-based approach in their work and, thus, acknowledged the very assumptions of domestic governmental accountability underlying this study. And traditional advocacy by North-based human rights groups has put limited emphasis on local empowerment, relying primarily on “shaming” and external pressure. With this impressive study, Simmons has certainly put to rest an academic debate about the relevance of human rights treaties; now we are back to studying the precise mechanisms most likely to promote sustainable human rights change. A treaty-based approach to human rights is important, but it is most successful when agents on the domestic and international level have developed a sophisticated understanding of how to effectively integrate rights language in their broader strategies of social and political change. The domestic mechanisms advancing compliance are not a given, but are themselves dependent on the resources and strategies available to domestic and external agents favoring (or resisting) an international norm. Given the recent strategic changes in the behavior of many transnational activists engaged in human rights issues, the effects that Simmons identifies as causal for the modest positive role of human rights treaties in the past should only become more relevant and powerful in the future.