The sixth chapter applies the analytical framework for due diligence obligations to the field of human rights protection. The individual components of due diligence obligations are analyzed with regard to the specific risks and problems of human rights law. It addresses how knowledge of human rights risks can be established, how resource constraints alter human rights obligations in times of conflict and economic recession, and what reasonable measures of protection are required. Conclusions from the previous chapter are consulted in order to decide whether due diligence concepts and methods developed in other fields of international law might be fruitfully applied to the area of human rights protection. When analyzing the application of human rights due diligence obligations though, the chapter will also reveal that the implementation of such obligations is often hampered where states lack sufficient capacities to effectively regulate and control harmful non-state conduct.

This chapter examines land reform and property rights in Peru, which was characterized by high landholding inequality and semi-feudal landlord peasant relations until the 1960s, with roots in Spanish colonization. A transition to democracy brought initial land reform, and then a military coup in 1968 began massive land redistribution. Peasants received land through cooperatives but not property rights such as land titles. Property rights were strengthened slightly under democracy in the 1980s, but major land titling only began when Peru was facing a major economic crisis and the Shining Path insurgency in the early 1990s. President Fujimori closed Congress via an autogolpe and then worked with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to stabilize the economy and begin a nationwide land formalization program. This chapter uses process tracing, original archival documents, and interviews to detail the economic and political conditions that led to the origins and closing of Peru’s property rights gap, focusing on democracy, dictatorship, foreign pressure, and the role of landed elites, peasants, and political elites.

Political mobilization in the electoral and protest arenas have long been studied as separate phenomena, following their own, independent dynamic. Parties and protests are rarely examined within the same framework, although the protest engagement of political parties is often assumed to be one of the main driving forces of the wave of protest in southern European countries, those most exposed to the economic crisis. The chapter provides the first large-scale study of protests sponsored by political parties across Europe before and after the Great Recession. It relies on a novel protest event dataset, collected by semi-automated content analysis of news agencies. The data cover protests in thirty countries, from 2000 to 2015. The results show the ‘crowding out’ of political parties as the driving force of the protest wave in southern Europe. We find the highest share of party sponsored protest in eastern Europe, where unlike in north-western and southern Europe, right-wing and non-mainstream parties are also active in protest. In line with the overall findings of the book, our results confirm the distinctive dynamic of protest in the three European macro-regions and put the link between social movements and the new challenger parties in perspective.

This chapter links the political consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the electoral and protest arena. Therefore, this chapter combines the literature on economic voting with social movement research. It argues that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision-makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilization should thus amplify the impact of economic hardship on electoral punishment. The empirical analysis to study this relationship combines the data on protest with a dataset of electoral outcomes in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and that protests contributed to the destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.

In times of crisis, solidarity is increasingly challenged both nationally and internationally. Since the onset of the economic crisis, therefore, unsurprisingly clear signs of such challenge have been present in Europe. Against this background, the chapter analyses how solidarity in actual fact has been addressed in the context of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and especially as a response to the economic crisis. Therefore, an analysis of ten years of EU reactions is undertaken to obtain a deeper understanding of how solidarity may have materialised. As a basis for the analysis, the chapter first examines how solidarity has developed over time in the overarching primary EU law and then in the specific context of the EMU. It is, among other things, concluded, in general terms, that the architecture of the EMU was not truly founded on solidarity in the sense of explicit obligations of the stronger Member States to help those in need, but certain changes in support thereof may after all be considered to have materialised little by little over time.

Throughout its history, Europe has gone through various phases of economic downturn. A major one, known as the Great Recession, started out in 2008, first as a financial crisis and then as one of the deepest – if not the deepest – economic crises European countries have had to face so far. Europeans are still struggling with its negative effects. As citizens try to cope with such negative effects in their everyday lives, economic crises also have political effects. At the most basic level, two possible reactions may be mentioned. On the one hand, economic hardship may lead to a decline in political participation and civic engagement as the experience of economic difficulty can certainly be understood as draining resources from political participation.

This chapter builds on the previous ones by presenting a close analysis of the institutional and infrastructural factors that precipitated the outbreak and that perpetuated its spread. Precipitating describes the factors that immediately triggered the outbreak while perpetuating describes the factors that maintained propitious conditions for the ongoing transmission of cholera and that curtailed an effective public health response. I argue that the origins, scale and impact of the cholera outbreak were overdetermined by a multi-level failure of Zimbabwe’s public health infrastructure. I situate this multi-level failure in the country’s political conflicts and economic crisis, which created a ‘perfect storm’ for the fulmination of cholera. The chapter is organised around three principal features of Zimbabwe’s health infrastructure: the collapse of functioning health care delivery services; the spectacular mismanagement and sabotage of the country’s water reticulation systems; and the livelihood changes ushered in by the Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown and hyperinflation, which rendered vast swathes of the population vulnerable to cholera through food insecurity and malnutrition.

This chapter addresses a puzzle set up in Chapter 5: Why did Africa become so much more intrusive than Southeast Asia in the post–Cold War period, given that neither region experienced widespread democratization? A partial explanation for this variation in outcomes is that Africa’s normative priors were different – by the time these regions arrived at the 1980s, the norm of non-interference had already eroded to a greater extent in Africa than Southeast Asia. In this chapter, I make the case for another more proximate factor – economic performance. Poor economic performance renders states materially and socially vulnerable and creates legitimacy deficits, and these vulnerabilities make states more open to normative and institutional reform. In Africa, reform took the form of more intrusive regional norms and institutions. Southeast Asia’s stellar economic performance prior to the 1997 financial crisis served to reaffirm and reinforce its norm set – including non-interference. The crisis prompted some reform (and some erosion of non-interference) but not to the same degree as in Africa.

Europe’s journey toward the ideal of ever-denser integration, peace and prosperity has been buffeted by repeated trials of temptation, frustration and risk. Like Odysseus, who bound himself to the mast of his ship to avoid the seductive songs of the Sirens, political leaders of Europe bound themselves by treaty and fealty to the principle of fiscal discipline in order to protect themselves from the alluring yet fickle flows of global capital. As they discovered, such constraints are neither always effective nor always desirable. Consequently, also like Odysseus, economic policymakers and national politicians continue to employ a wide range of strategies to steer Europe past the twin challenges posed by a modern-day Scylla (i.e., a multiheaded monster of sluggish economic growth, resurgent nationalism and social unrest that threatens to yank politicians out of office and cast countries out of the European Union [EU]) and Charybdis (i.e., a whirlpool of financial capital energized by expansive monetary policy and conditional bailouts that threatens to pull individual countries and perhaps the EU itself underwater).

‘1989’ marked the start of an era of Westernization and liberalization. The disillusionment with this politics of convergence began in Russia in the mid-1990s, and then reached Eastern Europe a decade later. The economic crisis of 2008 broke faith in the superiority of the Western model, whilst accession to the European Union removed the political conditionality that had previously disciplined local politics. Powerful illiberal movements, in alliance with populist authoritarians in the West, challenged the naturalisation of liberalisation. The migration of their populations westwards and the ‘migrant crisis’ from 2015 sparked fantasies of demographic catastrophe. Against this background, such movements presented the East as the ‘true Europe’, defending its whiteness, Christianity, and heterosexuality against extra-European immigrants and a decadent West. They looked to new alliances with authoritarian and populists in China, Turkey, and the United States too. In so doing such populists reimagined their region’s place beyond Western-style politics, EU conditionality, and a Euro-Atlantic space. There was significant resistance though: EU officials, local centrist parties, and civic mobilizations continued to embrace 1989 as a symbol of unfulfilled hopes of democratic transformation.