Why do movements succeed in some places but not others? Why do some states accept commitments championed by principled advocacy movements while others do not? These questions animate this book. This chapter seeks to provide several alternative explanations for differences in movement success and state behavior that I then apply in later chapters to the four substantive cases and the seven advanced industrialized countries that make up the G-7.

I start with the most spare and obvious kinds of explanations that are typical in much of political science, those that emphasize self-interest and costs (i.e., “states will act in accord with their self-interests” and “movements will succeed when what they ask for is not costly”). I then demonstrate that such explanations, while a helpful beginning, cannot explain behavior in all circumstances. There are a number of instances even among these few cases where states seemingly acted against their short-run material interests – for example, Japanese and French ultimate support for debt relief, Japanese and Canadian ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, and British and French ratification of the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court. Even in cases where self-interest seems like a plausible explanation for a state's behavior (such as US contributions to combat the global AIDS pandemic), more complex explanations are needed and are more persuasive.

In this chapter, I make the central case that states may accept reasonably costly international commitments when advocates have framed their messages to fit with the values of the polities they are targeting.