Challenging Stigma from Below: How Human Rights Movements Contest Repressive States and Shape Democratic Citizenship

Despite promises to honor human rights, several transitions to democracy over the past decades have been accompanied by bloody waves of large-scale political and criminal violence targeting marginalized groups. Governments often shift blame onto victims to evade accountability. How can we motivate the political mobilization of citizens to demand justice for human rights violations? I develop a theory stressing the role of intrinsic and extrinsic barriers to solidarity and argue that the answer lies in targeting these obstacles. My book project focuses on the key role played by the families of victims of gross human rights violations, often women—mothers, sisters, and wives—who share the same stigmatized identities as their victimized relatives. Contrary to dominant political science models suggesting that victims’ movements should not exert relevant influence due to their socioeconomic status, I place them as key actors in democracies rife with state and criminal violence. By destigmatizing victims and shaping perceptions of social norms, human rights groups can elicit citizens' political participation and demands for accountability. Combining original survey and field experiments, surveys, focus groups, and interviews in Mexico's War on Drugs, I show that while authorities' criminalizing frames demobilize people, exposure to victims' testimonies promotes pro-human rights engagement by overcoming affective, cognitive, and normative barriers to solidarity. Despite their crucial role in instilling core democratic values, I also find that hearing personal narratives may trigger fear of victimization and inadvertently prompt wary individuals to adopt punitive attitudes to restore their own sense of security. These reactions manifest through public willingness to trade off democracy for greater safety and heightened demands to retaliate against perpetrators, often at the expense of the rule of law. This study reconsiders how grassroots human rights groups shape democratic citizenship in societies where politicians legitimize atrocities.

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