Moral Movements and Foreign Policy

Explores why transnational advocacy movements for global causes succeed in some cases but fail in others.

Joshua W. Busby (Author)

9780521125666, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 July 2010

348 pages, 10 b/w illus. 26 tables
22.8 x 15 x 1.7 cm, 0.55 kg

'This book makes a major contribution to the comparative study of advocacy movements by introducing the literature on gatekeepers/veto players. It is a variation on the political opportunity structure approach with special relevance to stable, democratic systems. The model provides a means by which to identify the individuals and agencies within a state that either prevent or promote moral action. The author is very disciplined and focused on advancing the main argument of the book … Thanks to its compelling research design, [it] advances our understanding of success and failure for transnational advocacy movements.' Nandini Deo, American Journal of Sociology

Why do advocacy campaigns succeed in some cases but fail in others? What conditions motivate states to accept commitments championed by principled advocacy movements? Joshua W. Busby sheds light on these core questions through an investigation of four cases - developing-country debt relief, climate change, AIDS, and the International Criminal Court - in the G-7 advanced industrialized countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Drawing on hundreds of interviews with policy practitioners, he employs qualitative, comparative case study methods, including process-tracing and typologies, and develops a framing/gatekeepers argument, emphasizing the ways in which advocacy campaigns use rhetoric to tap into the main cultural currents in the countries where they operate. Busby argues that when values and costs potentially pull in opposing directions, values will win if domestic gatekeepers who are able to block policy change believe that the values at stake are sufficiently important.

1. States of grace
2. Movement success and state acceptance of normative commitments
3. Bono made Jesse Helms cry: Jubilee 2000 and the campaign for developing country debt relief
4. Climate change: the hardest problem in the world
5. From God's mouth: messenger effects and donor responses to HIV/AIDS
6. The search for justice and the International Criminal Court
7. Conclusions and the future of principled advocacy.

Subject Areas: Social impact of environmental issues [RNT], The environment [RN], International criminal law [LBBZ], International relations [JPS], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB]