Kathryn Sikkink

Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Sikkink works on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, transitional justice, and the laws of war.

Her publications include International, Norms, Moral Psychology, and Neuroscience (with Richard Price); The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilies; Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century; The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award and the WOLA/Duke University Award); Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America; Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck and awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order and the ISA Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations); and The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp).

She holds an MA and a PhD from Columbia University. Sikkink has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the editorial board of International Organization.

Videos

Kathryn Sikkink - Emancipation Through Human Rights: A Global Perspective

Rights and Responsibilities on Campus and in Our Professions: Protest and Free Speech on YouTube

Selected Publications by Interest Area

Human Rights & Justice

Sikkink, Kathryn. 2002. “Transnational Advocacy Networks and the Social Construction of Legal Rules.” Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy, edited by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, 37–64. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Publisher's Version

Full Chapter

Used with permission.

International Relations & Security

Schmidt, Averell, and Kathryn Sikkink. 2018. “Partners in Crime: An Empirical Evaluation of the CIA Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program.” Perspectives on Politics 16 (4): 1014-1033. Publisher's Version Abstract

partnersincrime.pdf

In the years following the attacks of 9/11, the CIA adopted a program involving the capture, extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists in the war on terror. As the details of this program have become public, a heated debate has ensued, focusing narrowly on whether or not this program “worked” by disrupting terror plots and saving American lives. By embracing such a narrow view of the program’s efficacy, this debate has failed to take into account the broader consequences of the CIA program. We move beyond current debates by evaluating the impact of the CIA program on the human rights practices of other states. We show that collaboration in the CIA program is associated with a worsening in the human rights practices of authoritarian countries. This finding illustrates how states learn from and influence one another through covert security cooperation and the importance of democratic institutions in mitigating the adverse consequences of the CIA program. This finding also underscores why a broad perspective is critical when assessing the consequences of counterterrorism policies.

Democracy & Governance

Sikkink, Kathryn. 2005. “Patterns of Dynamic Multilevel Governance and the Insider-Outsider Coalition.” Transnational Protest and Global Activism, edited by Donatella Della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, 151–73. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Publisher's Version

Full Chapter

Politics

Finnemore, Martha, and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change.” International Organization 52 (4): 887–917. Publisher's Version Abstract

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.