Guardians at the Regional Level: How European and Latin American Regional Organizations Shame Violators of International Norms
When Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022, the condemnation was immediate and global. Besides the United Nations General Assembly, some of the sharpest voices came from regional organizations (ROs). In Europe, the European Union, the Council of Europe, and — more surprisingly, given its narrow technical mandate — the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) led the political condemnation of Moscow. This was not an exclusively European phenomenon: far from the battlefield, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and the Central American Integration System (SICA) also condemned Russia’s assault on core norms such as territorial integrity. In doing so, these regional institutions did what they had been doing for two decades: they named a norm violator and shamed it.
“Naming and shaming” is one of the oldest tools in international politics. It costs little, requires no army, and works by simple logic: states care about their reputations, and public condemnation by a group of peers imposes a reputational price that can result in tangible economic and financial costs for violator regimes. International organizations are especially suited to shame norm violators, because they condemn collectively — on behalf of many governments — and so carry more weight than any single country’s response. This raises two questions: which organizations shame norm violators, and why do some speak up while others stay silent?
To explore them, we assembled an original dataset of shaming events by sixteen regional organizations in Europe and Latin America between 2000 and 2024. We counted only unambiguous condemnations — statements that named the violator and used words such as “condemn,” “deplore,” or “denounce,” setting aside softer expressions of “concern.” The picture that emerges is relevant on two counts. First, regional shaming is far more common and far older than the headlines of 2022 suggest. Second, it is unevenly distributed due to the interaction between regime-type composition and the institutional design of ROs. By global standards, the ROs of Europe and Latin America share broadly democratic memberships; what separates vocal from silent ROs is how that democratic density interacts with institutional design, particularly decision-making rules.
A practice with deep roots
It is tempting to treat the avalanche of condemnations after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as the moment ROs discovered their voice. The data say otherwise. Of the 581 shaming events we recorded between 2000 and 2024, roughly 146 occurred before 2022. This points to a persistent baseline that ranged from just a couple of condemnations in the quietest years to 17 in the busiest. Long before Ukraine, European and Latin American ROs were calling out abuses in Myanmar, Syria, Sudan, Venezuela, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Iran, among others. This matters for how we read the present. The surge of 2022 — 241 shaming events that year, 137 in 2023 — was extraordinary, and Ukraine is by far the single most-condemned situation in our records. But it did not appear from nowhere: it was the activation, at unprecedented scale, of a capacity these organizations had exercised at lower intensity for twenty years. This captures something important: a durable institutional habit of defending international norms, ready to scale up when the stakes become existential.
Figure 1. Shaming events by region, 2000–2024. A steady baseline of regional condemnations precedes the dramatic surge that follows Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The norm Moscow breached helps explain the scale of the response. The invasion was a frontal assault on territorial integrity, perhaps the most foundational rule of the post-1945 order — and, unlike contested liberal norms such as human rights, one that every state formally recognizes. When a basic rule is broken by a major power, organizations that once condemned isolated abuses suddenly find themselves defending the system’s architecture itself.
Europe leads, but Latin America is not absent
The two regions differ sharply in volume of shaming. European ROs account for the overwhelming majority of shaming events in our data (about 96%). The engine is the European Union, responsible for 442 recorded condemnations, followed at a distance by the Council of Europe with 68. Smaller bodies — the Nordic Council and even CERN — appear in the record as well, showing that the impulse to condemn is not confined to the largest players.
Figure 2. Total shaming episodes by organization, 2000–2024. The European Union dominates, but the Organization of American States and the Caribbean Community give Latin America a real, if smaller, presence.
Latin America’s footprint is much lighter — just 22 events across the whole period — but revealing. The OAS and CARICOM lead, with SICA also contributing. Latin American ROs do two distinct things. Within their own neighborhood, they police regional norms: Venezuela is their most frequently shamed target, reflecting sustained concern over its democratic backsliding. Beyond the region, they reach outward when the violation is grave enough — the single largest target of Latin American shaming in our data is Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, with eleven condemnations. That a breach of territorial integrity in Eastern Europe could prompt Latin American ROs to act is evidence that some norms are understood as universal and pivotal to preserving the rules-based international order that Latin American states helped create.
Why do European and Latin American ROs shame?
The starting point is political. By global standards, the ROs of Europe and Latin America are broadly democratic, and that shared democratic character is what disposes them to defend international norms in the first place. Democratic governments are more sensitive to domestic and international audiences and tend to treat silence in the face of a clear violation as a sign of disrespect for the rules they claim to uphold. They are also, from the outset, more committed to the human rights and rule-of-law norms whose breaches trigger condemnation. When democratic governments are members of an organization, their preferences aggregate into what is called its “democratic density”: the combined weight of its democratic members. Across the wider universe of international organizations, higher democratic density is a strong predictor of whether a body will point a finger. But within Europe and Latin America — where democratic density tends to be high — that shared disposition cannot, on its own, explain why the EU, the Council of Europe, the OAS, and CARICOM condemn prolifically while other, equally democratic bodies stay silent. The answer lies in how democratic preferences meet institutional design.
The pivotal design feature is pooling: the degree to which members surrender their national veto. Where decisions require unanimity or consensus, pooling is low, every member effectively holds a veto, and condemnation demands near-unanimous democratic agreement. Mercosur is the telling case. In the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion, the bloc had negotiated a statement condemning Russia under Paraguay’s presidency, only for Brazil — a fellow BRICS member with deep agricultural trade ties to Moscow — to withhold its endorsement. The statement died, and Mercosur registers zero condemnations in our data (Figure 2). Where members pool their sovereignty and decide by majority, the arithmetic flips. A determined democratic coalition can carry a condemnation over the objections of recalcitrant states that resist shaming due to (geo)political affinities with or material dependence on the norm violator. This is how the OAS — whose membership is more mixed than Europe’s democratic clubs — has repeatedly shamed the government of Venezuela for violating democratic norms, passing majority-backed condemnations despite resistance from Caracas and its allies. The lesson is that shaming springs not from democratic density alone, but from its interaction with the institutional design of international organizations.
The road ahead
Read across a quarter-century rather than a single year, the evidence shows that European and Latin American ROs have served as defenders of international norms, condemning abuses long before Ukraine and rallying with unusual force when territorial integrity came under direct attack. Their capacity to shame rests on the democratic character of their memberships and the rules through which those memberships act. As pressure on the rules-based order mounts, the question is whether European and Latin American ROs will continue to uphold core international norms consistently in the face of growing violations not only by autocratic powers but also by democratic ones.
Giovanni Agostinis is an associate professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Università di Bologna (UNIBO). received a Ph.D in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris and the IMT School for Advanced Studies (double degree). He has a MSc in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford. Between 2017 and 2022, Giovanni was an Assistant Professor at the Instituto de Ciencia Política of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He held research fellowships at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and the Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC).
The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of the EULAS Network.
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