THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Biography:
Rochelle Terman is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her work as a Book Workshop Fellow, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires, was published in 2023 with Princeton University Press. Terman's research primarily focuses on international norms and human rights. She has also explored areas like gender, Islamophobia, and computational social science. She is currently a faculty affiliate with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, the Committee on International Relations, and the Program on 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 joins the University of Chicago from Stanford University, where she was a post-doc at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
"The Geopolitics of Shaming" delves into the strategic logic underpinning international human rights enforcement. Rochelle Terman explores the motivations and mechanisms guiding how states penalize violations in other nations, identifying instances where shaming leads to improved human rights conditions and outlining situations where it may backfire.
Drawing on a diverse range of evidence, including large-scale cross-national data, original survey experiments, and detailed case studies, Terman demonstrates that human rights shaming is a deeply political process embedded within strategic relationships. By arguing that existing geopolitical dynamics shape both the causes and outcomes of shaming in global politics, Terman illustrates how adversaries may condemn human rights abuses but often provoke counterproductive responses. Friends and allies emerge as the most effective shamers, yet their reluctance to impose significant sanctions poses a challenge.
Challenging conventional wisdom on the role of norms in global affairs, "The Geopolitics of Shaming" contends that politicization is not a corruption but an integral aspect of the success of the global human rights project.