Chapter 1 Introduction
1.4 Analytical Approach
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2012). In fact, civil society is seen as so important to the government that Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) even has a department dedicated to NGO interaction.
1.4 Analytical Approach
In order to assess my research question, I will employ a qualitative analysis that focuses on two case studies. The first case involves advocacy done by an international French NGO called Reporters Without Borders 無國界記者 (Reporters Sans Frontieres, RSF), which is headquartered in Paris but operates a foreign bureau in Taipei. The second case involves advocacy done by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights 臺灣 人權促進會 (TAHR), a local Taiwanese human rights NGO that often collaborates with other human rights NGOs around the world. These two case studies, one involving a foreign NGO and one involving a domestic NGO, will offer two distinct demonstrations of how Taiwan is able to influence international institutions through civil society. As Taiwan is excluded from formal international institutions, civil society allows Taiwan to access a “track II diplomacy,” or informal, people-based diplomacy.
Through interviews and analyses of public statements, I will detail the ways in which Taiwanese employees of these two NGOs act to influence global political bodies from which Taiwan is excluded. The independent variable here is Taiwanese people’s participation in civil society organizations, and the dependent variable is whether Taiwan gains an international voice as a result. In order to measure this, I will assess whether Taiwanese people are able to actually change the proceedings of international institutions through the indirect channel of NGOs. If the answer is yes, then the proceedings of relevant international institutions must be different from the counterfactual of if Taiwanese people were not taking part in the NGOs. I will also
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discuss whether and how Taiwan’s global influence through NGOs advances its own geopolitical interests.
In order to carry out this research, I will first conduct interviews with employees of these NGOs. These interviews will be held with both Taiwanese employees and, if relevant, interviews with citizens of other countries who work at the NGOs. I will also interview people who work at the intergovernmental organizations in question to confirm they were influenced by the NGO advocacy done by Taiwanese citizens. I will also interview other experts on civil society in Taiwan for general advice on conducting my research. By conducting these interviews, I will be better able to assess how Taiwanese employees interact with people at geopolitical institutions around the world as part of their work. How are Taiwanese NGO workers able to influence global discourse on issues like human rights? What are the cases in which Taiwanese people can influence international organizations from which they are excluded?
My interviews will therefore comprise questions about the global aspect of NGO workers’ jobs. I will ask my interviewees to detail for me their interactions with other international NGOs or intergovernmental organizations. For example, I will have Anonymous A, a Taiwanese employee of RSF, tell me about case reports he/she has written which have been taken to the UN Human Rights Committee by his/her colleagues in Paris. Was he/she able to play a similar role as if he/she was a citizen of a member state of the UN?
In the case of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR), I will ask Taiwanese employees about interactions they have with international human rights groups. What are other international NGOs with which they are in frequent contact?
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What transpires in their interactions? Is TAHR able to affect the global discourse on human rights? Are they able to play an indirect role in intergovernmental organizations from which Taiwan is excluded?
Another important question I will ask is what are they not able to do. What are the weaknesses of trying to affect intergovernmental bodies through NGOs? What are some instances in which these employees have experienced exclusion? This will allow me to assess the limitations of track II diplomacy.
The interviews will likely last around half an hour each and will be corroborated with publicly available documents. For example, much of the RSF case reports filed to the UN Human Rights Council eventually become publicly available.
I’ve chosen these two cases because each sheds a valuable light into a different form of NGO interaction: RSF elucidates the workings of a foreign NGO in Taiwan, while TAHR shows the case of a Taiwanese NGO. Taiwan has both many local NGOs and many international ones. While Taiwanese NGOs may primarily seek to yield an outward effect of influence, and international NGOs may primarily seek to yield an inward effect of influencing Taiwan, I am interested to probe whether the distinction is so clear-cut, or if it is in fact more fluid, with both local and international NGOs having both inward and outward paths of influence.
These two cases are important because they resemble the values Taiwan has worked hard to foster since the end of martial law. Both NGOs do work relating to human rights and are emblematic of Taiwan’s shift away from authoritarianism several decades ago.
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This is important because human rights is an issue which Taiwan has the opportunity to capitalize on for soft power. Also, both NGOs do work that is critical of China’s human rights record, which is important because China is the source of Taiwan’s isolation. At international forums like the UN Human Rights Council, China is now slowly pushing for the world to recognize an alternative definition of human rights.
Under China’s new definition, human rights include the right to peace, security, education, and pursuit of wealth, but human rights do not include other freedoms like freedom of the press, assembly, expression, religion, or the right to vote. Whether China succeeds may be affected by Taiwan’s influence via NGOs, as Taiwan can offer an important Chinese-speaking rebuttal to China’s truncated articulation of human rights.
In order to measure the hypothesis, I will firstly seek to directly confirm that staffers at the UN and EU did consult the advocacy documents put forward by the Taiwanese civil society workers in my case studies. This will be done through communicating with staffers at the UN and EU who were privy to the deliberations in question.
Secondly, I will classify the level of influence achieved by advocacy into three tiers. The first tier is the most basic. It incorporates general advocacy made for the public, designed to draw support for a particular cause, but not likely affecting decisions made by policy-makers. A promotional tweet or blog post could fit this description.
The second tier of advocacy influence is more sophisticated. It involves targeting specific actors, often politicians or other leaders, who have the power to act on the issue in question. This advocacy may be open to the public, but it usually focuses on specific events in order to try to shape the way policy-makers will behave at those events. A
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limitation of this second tier is that the advocacy done, while homing in on specific leaders and events, inevitably falls into a general issue category such as human rights or environmental concerns. Therefore, this advocacy finds itself situated within a vast body of discourse touching upon the same topics found in the advocacy. This causes the existence of possible confounding variables when evaluating whether a certain act of advocacy caused a certain outcome.
The third tier is the most narrow and precise. Like the second tier, it involves time-specific advocacy to a certain influential audience. But unlike the second tier, it goes directly to the decision-makers in question, so we can be sure that no confounding variables exist, and we can say for certain that the act of advocacy caused a certain outcome.
My theoretical framework draws mostly from constructivist international relations theory, as I argue that its focus on social interactions and shared values relates most closely with the practice of civil society. Taiwan has been excluded from most formal international institutions, and therefore has no way to take part in the legal benefits of liberalism.
And although Taiwan relies on a realist military relationship with the United States for survival, it cannot use its military or monetary power for substantial influence, as China always looms more powerful. I therefore argue that constructivist shared values fostered from international interactions offer the best theoretical framework from which to view Taiwan’s international influence.
The theory of constructivism arises from the concept that “Many structures we take to be immutable in IR are actually embedded social relationships that are
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contingent to a large extent on how nation-states think about and interact with one another” (Sterling-Folker 2013, 130). According to the constructivist paradigm, “we create our own security dilemmas and competitions by interacting in particular ways with one another so that these outcomes appear to be inevitable” (Sterling-Folker 2013, 128).
As prominent constructivist thinker Alexander Wendt posited, the international political structure gives rise to social interactions where nations’ “identities and interests are socially constructed” (Wendt 1999, 248). An important aspect of his argument is that different leaders and societies can construct a shared culture composed of shared ideas which are then normalized into institutions and influence behavioral patterns (Wendt 1999, 249). This last element about institutionalization is not unimportant. “Once ideas have influenced organizational design, their influence will be reflected in the incentives of those in the organization and those whose interests are served by it” (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, 20).
The ideological infrastructure underpinning these institutions comprises norms with “collective expectations with ‘regulative’ effects on the proper behavior of actors with a given identity,” (Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 1998, 679-680). Norms, if accepted by groups of people over time, become subconscious understandings, and
“such collective understandings, and their accompanying social identities and interests, can become reified or embedded over time so that alternatives seem unimaginable”
(Sterling-Folker 2013, 128).
For this particular thesis, it is important to consider human rights and civil society through the lens of constructivism. Can Taiwanese citizens contribute to the
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reinforcement of global human rights norms through international civil society interactions? Will its global civil society engagement foster a shared culture with citizens of other countries?
Can Taiwan help frame a global human rights discourse that socially constructs other states’ interests to align with its own? As Wendt noted, “anarchy is what states make of it” (Wendt 1992, 395). In a world governed by disparate governments vying for power and influence, can Taiwan mold the institutional design of organizations from which it’s excluded, thereby affecting the incentives of individuals in those institutions?
Could Taiwan’s values coalesce with those of other countries so that one day alternatives to those values would seem unimaginable?