| Why do some of the world's least powerful states open themselves up to scrutiny of domestic policies for which they could be censured or even punished? Regimes invite inspection of elections they intend to rig, military activities in which human rights violations have occurred, and economic policies they scuttle with their own corrupt practices. I argue that this seemingly self-defeating behaviour constitutes an attempt to preserve autonomy by manipulating rather than resisting international attention, capitalizing on the low legibility many of these regimes exhibit to outsiders and their high symbolic value to global projects. Regimes in the world's least powerful states tend to operate by an internal logic rooted in patronage rather than bureaucracy, which makes depersonalized norms of human rights and good governance threatening to the basis of their authority. But as peripheral and often aid-dependent states, they are unable to resist application of these norms outright. When these regimes succeed in their attempts to conceal unsavoury domestic practices from international view, they not only reduce pressures toward norm-observance and bureaucratization in their domestic politics, they are liable to increase the norm's laxity in a way that makes it less able to constrain all states' internal behaviour. |
