Decoupling international agreements from domestic policy: The state and soft repression

Despite a dramatic expansion in states’ adoption of UN agreements to protect human rights, these efforts often fail to deliver on the full promise of compliance within national contexts. In this paper, we examine the process and mechanisms behind this hypocrisy paradox—when states sign onto yet fail to comply with international agreements. Borrowing from repression and social movement literature, we identify one central process that states draw on to avoid garnering international condemnation while maintaining non-compliance nationally: soft repression. We highlight two mechanisms of soft repression: the mobilization of state resources (work-ing at the macro-level to silence activists) and counterframing techniques (working at the meso-level to stigmatize activists and their goals). Using Ghana as a case study, we demonstrate how proposed domestic violence legislation lost ground when state actors mobilized resources to stall the bill and successfully counterframed the law as a foreign import and a threat to Ghanaian nationalism and families.