Political Science and International Studies

Fulfilling human rights treaty obligations extends beyond the mere ratification by national governments; it depends on the practices of local authorities, which continuously remake human rights standards and policies originating from higher levels of governance. In Agents of Recalcitrance: The Struggle for Compliance with International Human Rights Law in Decentralized States, Mintao Nie posits that governmental decentralization, characterized by increased autonomy for local authorities in local affairs, reduces state compliance with human rights treaties. This reduction occurs because governmental decentralization impedes the downward spread of human rights norms across governmental tiers, creates numerous local actors immune to moral pressure from the international society, and enables the central government to evade international censure by shifting blame for human rights abuses to local officials. This focus on central-local governmental relations challenges the assumption of states as unitary actors, offering a systematic understanding of how the varied motives and constraints across different levels of government affect the translation of international human rights law into local practice, in a volume that will interest scholars, activists and lawyers.