Geoff Dancy

University of Toronto | U of T

Where is the human rights discourse most resonant? We use aggregated cross-national Google search data to test two divergent accounts of why human rights appeal to some populations but not others. The top-down model predicts that nationwide interest in human rights is attributable mainly to external factors such as foreign direct investment, transn...

In states emerging from mass violence and human rights abuses, do individuals prefer retributive punishment of perpetrators through trials, or do they wish to be compensated with land or monetary reparations for their injuries? How does the concrete option of prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) moderate these preferences? Using u...

This article presents and tests an original theory that truth commissions (TCs) inspire democratic behaviors, but have little discernible impact on democratic institutions. Using quantitative analyses of countries undergoing transitions between 1970 and 2015, and accounting for endogeneity of TCs, we find that these temporary bodies are associated...

On 25 August 2020, amid widespread protests, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse freely roamed the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15. In extended altercations late that night, he shot three protesters, killing two. Despite repeatedly encountering police before and after he discharged his firearm, he was never reprimanded by authorities. Policin...

Commentators now regularly declare that the International Criminal court (ICC) – and international criminal law as a whole – is in crisis. It is certainly the case that the ICC faces a number of operational challenges, and that these challenges worry its defenders. However, one unexamined rationalist assumption is that the Court’s inability to deli...

“The International Criminal has struggled with the perception that it is biased against Africans, especially in relation to its investigation in Kenya. But which Kenyans are most likely to believe the ICC is biased?” Building on pluralistic models of public opinion and psychological studies, we aim to contribute to emerging research on attitudes to...

The global transitional justice tool kit - involving the use of criminal prosecutions, amnesties, and other mechanisms to address past human rights abuse - has become a primary means for thwarting future human rights violations and consolidating democracy. Nevertheless, evidence on the consequences of transitional justice remains mixed and amenable...

Do legal amnesties for combatants help end civil wars? International policy experts often take it for granted that amnesties promote negotiated settlements with rebels. However, a large number of amnesties are followed by continued fighting or a return to the battlefield. What, then, are the factors that make amnesties effective or ineffective? In...

The International Criminal Court’s interventions have prompted debate about the wisdom of criminally prosecuting combatants while attempting to build peace in conflict-ridden societies. Previous research fails to distinguish between different types of trials. Using a large-N dataset of three types of criminal trials undertaken during internal confl...

Fifty years ago, the world had very few human rights laws and very little information on human rights violations. Today, the situation could not be more different. The world is awash in laws and indicators of legal violations, and two perspectives have developed to explain their relationship. The factualist approach measures whatever information is...

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the effects of domestic atrocity laws on human rights prosecutions. Scholars have identified various political and sociological factors to explain the striking rise in human rights prosecutions over the past 30 years, yet the role of domestic criminal law in enabling such prosecutions has largely...

The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea. By Hun Joon Kim. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 232p. $39.95. - Volume 15 Issue 3 - Geoff Dancy

For the first time in one collected volume, mainstream and critical human rights scholars together examine the empirical and normative debates around the future of human rights. They ask what makes human rights effective, what strategies will enhance the chances of compliance, what blocks progress, and whether the hope for human rights is entirely...

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is controversial, acutely so in Africa. The first thirty-nine people it indicted were all African. It did not open any formal investigations outside Africa until the 2016 decision to investigate conduct related to the 2008 Georgia-Russia war. The first three notifications of withdrawal from the ICC Statute, ea...

Does the International Criminal Court ( icc ) deter acts of violence in the world? To answer this question, this article first distinguishes between three phenomena that are often confusingly grouped together under the heading of ‘deterrence’. These include the termination of ongoing civil wars (compellence), the prevention of atrocity crime recidi...

New Realist critics of international law, like many international relations realists who came before, are taking aim at human rights for its hopeless legalism. These critics rely on a regulative model that narrowly conceives of human rights laws as potentially enforceable rules without teeth. The article defines and elaborates an alternative consti...

Does the International Criminal Court (icc) deter acts of violence in the world? To answer this question, this article first distinguishes between three phenomena that are often confusingly grouped together under the heading of 'deterrence'. These include the termination of ongoing civil wars (compellence), the prevention of atrocity crime recidivi...

Human rights scholars and activists have often been criticized for being “principled” rather than “pragmatic” actors in international politics. Rarely, though, is such criticism accompanied by a discussion of what pragmatism means, or what pragmatic action looks like. This article conceptually traces and defines three aspects of pragmatism — philos...

Transitional justice (TJ) scholars are increasingly concerned with measuring the impact of transitional justice initiatives. Scholars often assume that TJ mechanisms must be properly designed and ordered to achieve lasting effect, but the impact of TJ timing and sequencing has attracted relatively little theoretical or empirical attention. Focusing...

Over the last three decades, thousands of prosecutions for human rights abuses have progressed through domestic courts, a puzzling fact considering that state leaders have little incentive to punish their own agents. Previous studies have advanced rational-choice or sociological-institutionalist accounts of this phenomenon, emphasizing the role of...

This article shows that International Criminal Court investigation in a country situation is correlated with increased domestic human rights prosecutions in the intermediate term. Using evidence from Africa, the article argues that this relationship results from a “willingness game” between ruling coalitions attempting to feign commitment to human...

There has been much theorizing, but little empirical exploration, of the relationship between transitional justice (TJ) and economic structures. In this article, we articulate three models implicit in present studies: TJ as a roadblock to economic growth; TJ as a bridge to human development; and TJ as a vehicle of inequality. We then perform a plau...

New Realist critics of international law, like many international relations realists who came before, are taking aim at human rights for its hopeless legalism. These critics rely on a regulative model that narrowly conceives of human rights laws as potentially enforceable rules without teeth. The article defines and elaborates an alternative consti...

Prevalent in current discussions of peace-building are various claims about the ways in which justice-seeking mechanisms - like human rights trials and truth and reconciliation commissions - can quell violent conflict. In fact, ‘transitional justice’ has attained the status of orthodoxy among global peace-promoting actors and international institut...

Discussions of impact assessment and evaluation are the newest installment in the brief history of the field of transitional justice. Noticeably, a positivist logic of inference is being favored in these discussions. This article argues that a distinction should be made between impact assessment and evaluation, and that the role of positivist appro...

Interest in cross-national comparison of transitional justice mechanisms has grown recently, as has the study of truth commissions in particular. However, as is true of many emerging areas of research, progress has been hampered by significant gaps in data and by a lack of consensus as to what constitutes the universe of cases. To address this prob...

Objective. The objective of this article is to explain judicial decision making at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia by analyzing the impact of individual, national, and international factors. Methods. We use regression and probit analysis of data on the verdicts and sentences handed down by the judges. Results. We find...