Rochelle Terman Named the Recipient of the 2024 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award

The 2024 APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award has been awarded to Rochelle Terman for her first book, titled The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works - and When It Backfires, published by Princeton University Press in 2023. Rochelle Terman is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international norms and human rights.

The APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award has been established to honor Lowi’s distinctive contributions to the study of politics. Throughout a prolific and influential career, Lowi developed new understandings of the relationship of public policy to politics, the influence of institutional arrangements to the exercise of power, the role of ideology in the development of political parties, the relationship of democracy to law, the relevance of concept analysis for theory building, and more.

Citation from the Award Committee
The APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award committee has unanimously selected Professor Termans’s book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works - and When It Backfires. This innovative study on the use of international moral pressure against a government violating the rights of its citizens combines evidence from large-scale cross-national data, original survey experiments, and multiple in-depth case studies across a wide range of contexts. Terman presents a new theory on the strategic logic of international human rights enforcement, revealing why and how states punish violations in other countries, when shaming leads to an improvement in human rights conditions, and when it backfires.

The book establishes that human rights shaming is a deeply political process, one that operates in and through strategic relationships. Arguing that preexisting geopolitical relationships condition both the causes and consequences of shaming in world politics, Terman shows how adversaries are quick to condemn human rights abuses but often provoke a counterproductive response, while friends and allies are the most effective shamers, but can be reluctant to impose meaningful sanctions. Offering a new take on the role of norms in international affairs, The Geopolitics of Shaming represents an important contribution to our understanding of the global human rights project.

Rochelle Terman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She specializes in international norms and human rights. Her first book, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works - and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press. She has also produced work on gender, Islamophobia, and computational social science. Prof. Terman earned her B.A. from the University of Chicago, and Ph.D. in Political Science with a designated emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the University of Chicago from Stanford University, where she was a post-doc at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.