Back up or Backfire? The Impact of Human Rights Sanctions on Target Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Human Rights and Mobilizations

Abstract How do citizens in target countries respond to international human rights sanctions when governments contest their legitimacy? While human rights sanctions aim to promote rights and support dissent, they operate within contested information environments where target governments deploy counter-narratives framing sanctions as illegitimate foreign interference. This exploratory study repositions sanctions as communicative acts whose domestic impact hinges on narrative competition. Using a survey experiment in India, I explore how public opinion responds to different narratives about hypothetical EU human rights sanctions. I find suggestive evidence that single-message frames, whether emphasizing human rights protection or foreign interference, may not shift public attitudes. However, when citizens received both narratives simultaneously, sympathy for anti-government protests appears to decline, particularly among government critics. While exploratory, this study signals that competing narratives may create an overlooked form of backfire: demobilizing government critics who would otherwise support human rights rather than rallying regime loyalists, thus expanding our understanding beyond traditional backup-versus-backfire debates. These preliminary findings invite replication across different political contexts and sanction regimes to establish whether this demobilization effect represents a systematic pattern in how contested sanctions shape domestic opinion.