Expanding your work space: Increasing deterrence and dissuasion
Human rights defenders working in hostile environments should be able to conjure up enough political costs to frighten an aggressor into not attacking them: This is called deterrence.
It is useful to distinguish between “general” and “immediate” deterrence. General deterrence consist of the combined effect of all national and international efforts at protecting defenders, i.e. anything which helps to create a general understanding that attacks against defenders will have negative consequences. This can happen through wide thematic campaigns or training and information about protecting defenders. On the other hand, immediate deterrence sends a specific message to a specific aggressor to keep their attacks away from a specific target. Immediate deterrence is necessary when general deterrence fails or is seen to be insufficient, and when protection efforts are focused on specific cases.
Dissuasion is a more inclusive concept. It can be defined as the result of acts which induce an opponent not to carry out a contemplated hostile action. Rational argument, moral appeal, increased cooperation, improved human understanding, distraction, adoption of non-offensive policy and deterrence may all be used to achieve dissuasion. Each of these tactics are used at different times by defenders at the national or international levels. Defenders cannot of course use direct “threats” very often: The strategy is more about reminding others that, depending on their decisions, a series of consequences could occur.
Putting deterrence to work
In order to measure whether we have been effective in deterrence, a series of conditions must be met:
1. Defenders must clearly specify and communicate to the aggressor what types of actions are unacceptable. Deterrence will not work if the aggressor does not know which actions will provoke a response.
2. The defenders’ organisation must articulate its commitment to deterring the aggression in a way that makes the aggressor aware of it. The organisation must also have a strategy in place for accomplishing the deterrence.
3. The defenders’ organisation must be capable of carrying out the deterrence, and make the aggressor aware of this. If a threat of mobilising national or international reaction is not credible, there is no reason to expect it to have a protective effect.
4. Defenders must know who the aggressor is. Hit squads often work in the dark of night and rarely claim responsibility. This therefore often boils down to analysing who might benefit from an attack. In order to improve the effectiveness of a national or international reaction, an assumption of “state responsibility”, although correct, requires more specific information about which factions within the state apparatus are behind the attack.
5. The aggressor must have seriously considered attacking and then decided not to carry it out because the costs - due to the defenders’ commitment - would be greater than the benefits.
It is difficult for defenders to dissuade an aggressor who will remain unaffected by a commitment to deter: This happens when governments can be punished by the international community, but cannot in turn punish the actual human rights violator. For example, private armies can be outside the government’s reach or don't share its interests. In such cases, the aggressor may even benefit from attacking human rights defenders, because attacks will put the government in a difficult position and harm its image.
Defenders will never know in advance if their “deterrence commitment” is strong enough to dissuade a potential attack. The aggressor may expect benefits that defenders are not aware of. Assessing the situation as carefully as possible is a permanent challenge and may even be impossible due to lack of critical information. Defenders’ organisations must therefore develop extremely flexible fallback plans and the ability to respond rapidly to unexpected events.