The APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award is presented annually to honor a book in any field of political science that exemplifies qualities of broad ambition, high originality, and intellectual daring, showing promise of having a substantive impact on the overall discipline, regardless of method, specific focus of inquiry, or approach to the subject.
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.
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.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Irasema Coronado of Arizona State University, Dr. Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Serge Granger of the University of Sherbrooke, Dr. Nazita Lajevardi of Michigan State University, and Dr. A. Maurits van der Veen of the College of William & Mary.