Legal systems and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) have often proved ineffectual in their efforts to enforce respect for human rights. Consequently non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have disseminated information in an attempt to mobilise action through responses from the public. NGOs have become crucial actors in human rights campaigning (Hopgood, 2006; Price, 2003; Keck and Sikkink, 1998), and a key aspect of their activity is the ‘mobilization of empathy’ (Brown and Wilson, 2008).

A major part of human rights work is the production of written reports, which are both a means to an end – whereby ‘information is collected, checked, standardized, and disseminated as part of a wider strategy to prevent violations and implement universal standards’ – and an end in themselves – based on the belief that even without results there is an absolute duty to convey the truth, to bear witness (Cohen, 1996:517). Human rights reports are now considered to have established themselves as a genre (Dudai, 2006) and, arguably, the key genre of human rights publications.

A sub-case of human rights advocacy consists in asking Western audiences to act for the benefit of people in distant countries. This type of communication (in the form of campaigns and appeals) is less legal in style and less laden with information than human rights reports, which are designed to circulate within a closed circuit of other human rights organisations, governments or intergovernmental bodies (Cohen, 1996).

Crucially, and in contrast to human rights reports, human rights campaigns and appeals are widely available to the public and, together with what is generated through the media, the most visible source of information on human rights violations. What is common to both types of human rights communication (reports and campaigns/appeals) is that their effect on the wider public remains unknown and unmonitored (Cohen, 1996).

The success of human rights campaigns is increasingly dependent on the ability to successfully elicit an effective response from the public. These appeals are designed to encourage the public to engage with the protection of human rights in two ways. The first is to put pressure on governments, or non-state actors, in order to stop abuse in ways ranging from letter-writing to consumer boycotts. The rise of the internet and internet-based social networks has increased the options for such public pressure, without which few human rights campaigns would succeed. The second is to promote fundraising activities so that independent NGOs and human rights NGOs can continue to operate.

Human rights campaigns and appeals inform the public about human rights abuses in order to elicit compassion and mobilise people to respond and act for distant others. But the assumption that ‘if only people knew, they would act’ often proves wrong (Slovic, 2007a,b; Cohen, 2001; Geras, 1999). Not only does the public response barely match the scale of the atrocities, but the information seems to drop into some kind of ‘cognitive black hole’ (Seu, 2011b; Cohen and Seu, 2002; Cohen, 1996). The key challenge in human rights campaigning, therefore, is to understand what happens to human rights information when it reaches the public, in order to avoid its neutralisation and instead promote proactive responses from audiences.

One of the challenges in communicating with the public involves bridging the gap between the concept of human rights in terms of norms and legal structure, and people’s ordinary understanding of human rights (Christenson, 1997; Bowring, 1994). While the former is generated within a universalising legal system, the latter is being constructed within people’s specific historical, ideological and emotional frameworks. A recent study conducted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission shows basic ignorance and confusion about human rights among the British public (Ballagan et al., 2009). Thus it seems urgent to gain detailed insight into the ways in which human rights information and appeals are understood by their target audience, in order to promote sustainable and successful campaigning. It is essential for human rights organisations to know how their appeals are received so that they can translate people’s knowledge about distant suffering into moral response and action whilst at the same time maintaining impartiality and factual accuracy in their appeals (Dudai, 2006). Yet hardly any research has been carried out in this important field, and human rights organisations lack the means to carry it out themselves.

Passivity Generation reports on a series of studies set up to explore what happens to the knowledge related to human rights violations when it reaches the public. The research was designed as an exploratory and inductive ‘bottom-up’ investigation with the purpose of generating rather than testing theory on this empirically neglected and under-theorised topic.

What happens in the gap between knowledge and action has been of interest to many different disciplines and schools of thought, each addressing specific aspects of the phenomenon from within their specific epistemological and intellectual traditions. This greatly complicates the task of delineating the intellectual boundaries of this book. Literature on human rights and on public understanding of, and attitudes towards, human rights is clearly relevant to Passivity Generation and so is the vast literature on prosocial behaviour, social responsibility and altruism. Issues discussed under the umbrella of ‘the politics of pity’, distant suffering and problems of representation of distant suffering are also important, as are debates in moral philosophy and research into moral reasoning. The bordering fields of humanitarianism and charitable behaviour also bring important insights.³

This is not an issue simply of the integration of bodies of research and current debates, but also and more importantly of how to define, and crucially how to think, their topic, as inevitably this is determined and constrained by how the issue is framed in the first place. This book aims to understand the psychosocial conditions and processes that generate passivity in members of the public, in the fabled ‘ordinary person’. Only a psychosocial lens allows proper nuanced consideration of socially constructed factors, psychological and emotional states, biographical factors and the subjective capacity for agency to resist, comply, integrate and negotiate all these elements. The psychosocial approach offered in this book does not just explore each of these domains independently, but pays attention to the very important dynamics between the domains.

A vignette from my childhood might help to convey my view of the psychosocial field I aim to capture. Once I stood transfixed in front of a most curious shop window. I don’t remember what the shop was selling; it was either a stationery shop or a hardware store. The ‘thing’ I saw in the window did not easily fit into a recognisable category. At first it appeared to be a shallow tray full of live buzzing bees. Intrigued by how anybody would want to keep bees in their shop window, I stood there and studied the tray. On closer examination I realised that these were not real bees, but metal ones each stuck, I presume, on a magnet. As each bee was attracted into the magnetic field of another, it moved in that direction, thus relinquishing the bees it was attracting and breaking the original and temporary balance, and in turn generating a series of other attractions which would then be broken, and so on. Because the distance between bees was so precisely calibrated, individual bees never really got very far, but would get in and out of each other’s magnetic field, creating a movement in all directions with no discernible order but engaging the bees in a perpetual, dynamic movement.

This curious object, which I now understand to be a miniature version of what would be defined in physics and chemistry as ‘dynamic equilibrium’,⁴ came back to me when reading the data generated in the focus groups as a fitting representation of participants’ psychosocial habitus. People, like the bees in the tray, are affected by many forces, ranging from the global geopolitical to the most intimate emotional reactions and personal experiences, through relatively smaller social and interpersonal contexts. All these influences or ‘forces’ are not passively submitted to, but negotiated with, resisted, accommodated and influenced in turn. Applying the principle of dynamic equilibrium to public responses and reactions to human rights issues enables us to capture the ‘hovering’ and unstable nature of action and inaction.

The magnetic bee tray thus could be a useful representation of what the psychosocial field of public action and inaction looks like and how it operates. Whilst it is important to know what prompts members of the public to respond proactively – in whatever way – this book is concerned with public passivity, broadly encompassing any lack of response, be it in terms of emotions, cognition and/or action. By viewing public responses in terms of a dynamic equilibrium, I want to resist a simplistic approach to public passivity. Rather, I want to unpack the notion of passivity through the idea that the manifested stillness, here defined as passivity, is the overt manifestation of a dynamic interplay of forces. Thus framing public passivity as a dynamic equilibrium doesn’t dispute the end product of passivity, but engages with the dynamism and complexity underpinning and leading to the passivity.

By identifying and engaging with the different forces at play through this model, I want to draw attention to the paradoxically lively and generative potential of what ostensibly appears as inertia. Because a model of dynamic equilibrium describes a precarious stability which, by definition, is constantly under threat of disruption, it is possible to think of points of tension as potential openings for change and intervention. What appears as inertia or overall passivity can then be viewed as amenable to shifting either way: towards further passivity, but also towards active engagement with human rights issues.

The idea of a dynamic equilibrium graphically represents how members of the public are affected by structural and societal conditions that foster passivity as well as personal biographical and intra-psychic factors inhibiting action. All these factors, even when not dominating the individual, are nevertheless always present and interact in dynamic equilibrium with other forces in a constant process of transition, negotiation and movement. The challenge in conceptualising and writing about such a complex and incessantly moving dynamic is twofold. First is how to stay close enough to the details and the interaction of each component which generates passivity in order to arrive at a nuanced and detailed understanding of it whilst simultaneously holding the meta-level of how it is situated within the wider psychosocial field where it interacts with other forces. Second is how to arrive at conclusions that do justice to each force and the interaction between them, without flattening the dynamism of the interactions. Undoubtedly, it is not possible to achieve this through a linear trajectory as the psychosocial processes this book describes are far from ‘neat and tidy’.

Passivity Generation is an attempt to engage with, and make sense of, the complex and fluid nature of public passivity. The overarching motivation behind this book is to offer an integrated multidisciplinary exploration of the multifaceted and multi-factorial phenomenon of public passivity in response to human rights violations. The emphasis is on the ordinary person’s everyday understandings and reactions to information on human rights violations.

The book has four main aims. First, it aims to map out scripts, ‘ways of talking about’ and understanding human rights and their violations. How does the public understand human rights? Through which meanings and schema does the public make sense of human rights violations? The book is not concerned with abstract formulations; rather, it is interested in everyday understandings and in identifying values and beliefs through which information about human rights violations is processed and understood.

The second aim is to understand how members of the public view their social responsibility towards sufferers of human rights violations and human rights in general, and what kind of actions they take, or do not take, to express their responsibility. In this context, the book aims is to engage with everyday moral reasoning. How do members of the public understand their responsibilities and justify their inaction? How do individuals draw their moral boundaries and determine who and what are, and are not, their responsibility?

Third, Passivity Generation aims to understand the psychosocial factors that foster or prevent proactive responsiveness towards human rights. What socio-political, ideological, biographical, inter- and intra-psychic events and factors enable meaningful engagement with human rights issues? Through a psychosocial framing, the book pays close attention to processes of denial, both as psychodynamic operations of defence mechanisms activated by information about human rights violations and as ideologically laden vocabularies of denial.

Fourth, the book intends to offer empirically grounded recommendations to policy makers and to NGOs about better ways of informing the public about human rights and their violation, and how to facilitate a more meaningful, deeper and longer-lasting public engagement with human rights issues that goes beyond donations and short-lived participation.

The book opens with a multidisciplinary review of central themes and concerns of scholarly work on public passivity. Chapter 2 schematically charts how public passivity has been understood, discussed and researched so far. As well as providing a mapping of the disciplinary frames through which passivity has been understood, Chapter 2 introduces the psychosocial framework which will inform the book as a whole. It also gives key information about the studies on which the book is based.

Chapter 3 identifies broad patterns of explanations, justifications and reactions used by participants to ‘talk about’ human rights violations and their response to them. By looking at the most frequently used themes, the intention is to map out a typology of what issues, justifications, reactions and understandings are available to the public when discussing human rights violations. These themes are considered to be similar to Lakoff’s (2010, 2008) scripts and frames, whose function is to provide a ready-made understanding of human rights and their violations. In this chapter, as in the rest of the book, these are considered as moral scripts, not only because they are used by participants to reason and differentiate between right and wrong and justify their responses, but also because they were embedded in wider normative considerations about participants’ duties and responsibilities. Thus the second aim of this chapter is to reflect on the complex, contradictory and ambivalent nature of everyday moral reasoning. Finally, the chapter looks at how scripts intertwine and link with each other, producing complex and multi-layered justifications and understandings that, like strands in a web, lend support to each other and make the web ‘sticky’ and ostensibly stable and resistant to change.

The mapping contained in Chapter 3 begins to capture the intricacies of moral living and the complex dynamics taking place between stated values and their application. This theme is developed further in Chapter 4, which looks at the relationship between the public and NGOs, in particular in relation to what Darnton and Kirk (2011) call the ‘transactional frame’. One of the unexpected findings of this study was that NGOs mediate the public’s relationship with distant suffering and human rights in specific and powerful ways, beyond the obvious function of literally being mediators of the information. The data draws attention to the many ways in which the public experiences and responds to NGOs. Chapter 7 engages with the affective component of the relationship between public and NGOs, while Chapter 4 looks at how it is managed through operations of denial. A close analysis of the repertoires used by participants shows how everyday and banal justifications are used to neutralise Amnesty International’s moral claims, thus illustrating the power of denial in contributing to a widespread climate of passivity.

Chapter 5 focuses on how people connect, or do not, with suffering others in distant places. It starts with a brief review of how ideas about geographical distance, difference and otherness have been understood to connect to moral and social responsibility towards others who are distant or not part of one’s close group of identification and belonging. Crucial to these debates is the issue of moral boundaries. The second part of the chapter analyses the mechanisms through which participants draw their moral boundaries, whilst the third and final part of the chapter interrogates processes of ‘othering’ through which populations involved in human rights violations are constructed.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how moral reasoning is profoundly embedded in biography and identity and explores the complex and variable modalities through which they affect individuals’ responsiveness towards human rights violations. First, the chapter discusses examples of the identity work performed by participants’ accounts of their responses to human rights issues. Participants’ narratives make visible the ways in which moral positions are never neutral or pristine. Rather, they are saturated with passionate investment in the individual’s identity and the need to establish a good sense of self. The chapter also looks at the role of biography in setting up paths of engagement with others’ suffering and illustrates how, overwhelmingly, active engagement is prompted by direct exposure to others’ intense suffering, rather than by abstract or normative principles. Additionally, the chapter engages with the thorny issue of what constitutes an optimal amount of personal suffering necessary to connect individuals with the suffering of others. It identifies two psychodynamic attitudes – reparative and repetitive – resulting from...