NGOs’ investigate-expose-shame method fit markets but welcomed military intervention

Evidence

The methodology of many human rights NGOs, as Kenneth Roth, the director of the US-based Human Rights Watch notes, consists in the ability ‘to investigate, expose, and shame’, which involves identifying a particular violation, a specific violator, and a clear remedy. This has made these NGOs both reluctant and unsuited to challenge the structural and impersonal effects of market processes. Nevertheless, while supposedly eschewing coercion, major human rights NGOs, including Roth’s, have been quite prepared to call on the military might of the most powerful states to intervene in the name of securing human rights and universalising a distinctive moral order. In the process, they often aligned with the neoliberal embrace of a ‘strong security state, stripped of its social capacity’ so as to protect the market and enforce the morals of the market across the globe. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 61

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth testing: does the ‘specific violator’ methodology really explain NGO silence on structural harms, or is that convenient retrospective rationalization?
• SEED: Angle: ‘the naming-and-shaming method structurally pre-screens for state violators, making NGOs the natural allies of military intervention and the natural enemies of market critique.’
• XREF: connects to: Moral outrage over atrocities overrode expert assessments to justify military intervention — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2466; NGOs function as imperial weapons in feminist guise in the Afghan war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 311

Broader Connections

• Moral outrage over atrocities overrode expert assessments to justify military intervention #corroborates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2466