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Foreign interests and state repression: Theory and evidence from the Armenian genocide
Abstract
Existing work seeks explanations for state repression mainly in domestic factors such as ethnic/religious cleavages, poverty and inequality, struggle for power, regime type and quality of state institutions, lack of loyalty, demand for scapegoats, and cultural or psychological traits of perpetrators. How foreign influences shape state repression has been given less attention. Furthermore, the focus of the empirical literature has been largely cross-country, leaving much local variation unexplained. In this article, I examine how far foreign interests can explain the local (spatial) variation of deportations and massacres during the Armenian genocide. Between 1915 and 1917 the Ottoman Empire carried out a massive campaign of state repression (deportations and massacres) against its Armenian population. There was meaningful variation across Ottoman provinces in the intensity of this campaign, that is, some provinces experienced more repression than others. I investigate the determinants of this spatial variation. My empirical analysis is guided by a rationalist (economic) model where deportation is a tool to stifle Armenian calls for independence, but the benefit and cost of deportation vary spatially. For example, deportation is costlier (i.e. the risk of foreign intervention is greater) in locations where foreign economic and military interests are threatened by the departure of Armenians. In line with the model’s predictions, my empirical analysis indicates that there were fewer deportations in places where Armenians worked for the German-owned railway.
... Lehmann [31] examines the role of foreign interests in the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. During the formative years of the Ottoman Empire, he argues that foreign intervention played a significant role in the outbreak of the genocide and that political suppression of the Armenians was not the only reason for their systematic annihilation, as has often been assumed. ...
... During the formative years of the Ottoman Empire, he argues that foreign intervention played a significant role in the outbreak of the genocide and that political suppression of the Armenians was not the only reason for their systematic annihilation, as has often been assumed. Using statistical analyses, he provides evidence to support his argument and suggests that this approach can be applied to the study of other cases of genocide [31]. ...
Forensic anthropologists have been involved in investigating genocide and crimes against humanity for many decades. Raphael Lempkin first coined the term “genocide” in 1944, and in 1946, the United Nations General Assembly codified it as an independent crime. However, there has not been a systematic review available to better understand the history of many of these atrocities. Moreover, many of these events have not been discussed outside the cultures and individuals affected. This targeted literature review will discuss work on historic, lesser-known, modern genocides, and finally, the humanitarian forensic work being conducted in the field and digitally. Such events discussed include Herero and Namaqua, Sayfo, Armenian, Holodomor, Nanking (Nanjing), Romani, Palestinian, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sikh, and Rohingya genocides. Work being done in this important sector of research is a critical development for not only recognizing these crimes but also for documenting and protecting the evidence of these human rights violations.
... Germany restrained Ottoman repression of ethnic Greeks in 1914 in an effort to influence Greece's alignment in the war ( Akham 2012 ). Just six months later, Germany was permissive of the Ottoman genocide of Armenians in 1915and 1916( Dadrian 1996Lehmann 2022 ). As Dadrian (1996 , 147) notes, German Naval Attache to the Ottoman Empire Hans Humann declared, "The Armenians are now-the reason is their conspiracy with the Russians!-being ...
Genocide is a catastrophic event in international relations. States that experience genocide often have powerful external patrons that influence its likelihood. Yet, the external dynamics of genocide are often overlooked. This paper examines the constraining or enabling role of external patrons and what motivates their decisions. This research theorizes that patron states can permit or restrain genocide, depending on their interests in the client state. The study uses a qualitative comparative case analysis to focus on the role of patron military assistance, comparing genocide in Rwanda (1990–1994), and the role of France with the high-risk non-genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh (1991–1994) and Russian support to Armenia. I argue that patron actions can be understood through the prism of great or regional power competition and are generally determined by motivations conforming to a logic of realpolitik; the prospect of loss of influence significantly affects the likelihood of genocide. These processes can be observed through variations in patron military assistance and patterns of violence. A better understanding of these dynamics is critical to the study of international relations and international security, with policy implications for atrocity prevention in a period of intensifying great power competition.
Destabilized multiethnic states and empires are environments that are highly susceptible to violent ethnonationalist conflict. Conflicts between states built on the ruins of such empires and their minorities are especially common. James Fearon has famously argued that these conflicts are the result of minorities' rational incentives to rebel, which in turn are the result of newly independent states' inability to guarantee that these minorities will not be discriminated against if they acquiesce to citizenship, as well as expectations that over time the balance of power will shift against minorities as states consolidate their institutions. States can, however, take steps to reassure their minorities. The puzzle is why they often fail to do so. In fact, states often adopt policies that confirm minorities' worst fears, pushing them toward rebellion. Such action may be precipitated by a state's belief that a minority is motivated by a separatist agenda rather than by the desire to have its concerns and grievances satisfactorily addressed. If secession is a minority's primary objective, then concessions intended to demobilize the minority will only make the state more vulnerable to future demands and separatist bids. The existence of third parties with incentives to support minority separatism exacerbates the problem. The violent and nonviolent minority disputes in post-Soviet Georgia illustrate these findings. © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What drives a state's choice to assimilate, accommodate, or exclude ethnic groups within its territory? In this pathbreaking work on the international politics of nation-building, Harris Mylonas argues that a state's nation-building policies toward non-core groups - any aggregation of individuals perceived as an unassimilated ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state - are influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the Balkans, Mylonas shows that the way a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. Mylonas explores the effects of external involvement on the salience of cultural differences and the planning of nation-building policies. The Politics of Nation-Building injects international politics into the study of nation-building, building a bridge between international relations and the comparative politics of ethnicity and nationalism. This is the first book to explain systematically how the politics of ethnicity in the international arena determine which groups are assimilated, accommodated, or annihilated by their host states.
Why do multi-ethnic states treat various ethnic groups differently? How do ethnic groups respond to these state policies? We argue that interstate relations and ethnic group perceptions about the relative strength of competing states are important—but neglected—factors in accounting for the variation in state-ethnic group relations. In particular, whether an ethnic group is perceived as having an external patron matters a great deal for the host state's treatment of the group. If the external patron of the ethnic group is an enemy of the host state, then repression is likely. If it is an ally, then accommodation ensues. Given the existence of an external patron, an ethnic group's response to a host state's policies depends on the perceptions about the relative strength of the external patron vis-à-vis the host state and whether the support is originating from an enemy or an ally of the host state. We present five configurations and illustrate our theoretical framework on the eighteen largest ethnic groups in China from 1949 to 1965, tracing the Chinese government's policies toward these groups, and examine how each group responded to these various nation-building policies.
Over the past two decades, scholars have generated a large and sophisticated literature on genocide. Nevertheless, there are still several research areas that require further work. This article outlines a research agenda that analyzes the conditions under which genocide is likely to occur, the multilevel processes of violent escalation and de-escalation, and the ways in which these processes are shaped by, connect to, reinforce, accelerate and impede one another. I argue that scholars should 1) model elite and follower radicalization processes by disaggregating genocidal “intent” over time and space, and exploring how intent emerges rather than taking it as pre-given. Doing so will permit researchers to 2) situate genocide research within a broader context of political violence in order to understand how they are related temporally and spatially, and to decenter analytical domains beyond the standard country level and single victim group in order to gain insight into the dynamics of genocide, including how perpetrator policies vary by group; 3) draw on recent advances in microanalyses of civil war to theorize about subnational patterns of violence diffusion; 4) move beyond problematic contrasts between ideology and rationality to analyze how ideologies frame the strategic choices “available” to genocidal elites.
Research has begun to examine the relationship between changes in the conflict environment and levels of civilian victimization. We extend this work by examining the effect of external armed intervention on the decisions of governments and insurgent organizations to victimize civilians during civil wars. We theorize that changes in the balance of power in an intrastate conflict influence combatant strategies of violence. As a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit. The reason for this is twofold. First, declining capabilities increase resource needs at the moment that extractive capacity is in decline. Second, declining capabilities inhibit control and policing, making less violent means of defection deterrence more difficult. As both resource extraction difficulties and internal threats increase, actors’ incentives for violence against the population increase. To the extent that biased military interventions shift the balance of power between conflict actors, we argue that they alter actor incentives to victimize civilians. Specifically, intervention should reduce the level of violence employed by the supported faction and increase the level employed by the opposed faction. We test these arguments using data on civilian casualties and armed intervention in intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2005. Our results support our expectations, suggesting that interventions shift the power balance and affect the levels of violence employed by combatants.
Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally sug- gested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations intervened were quite different from those in which they did not. Therefore the estimated causal effect may be due to the assumptions of the model that the researchers chose rather than to peacekeeping itself. The root of the problem is that UN missions are not randomly assigned. We argue that standard approaches for dealing with this problem (Heckman regression and instrumental variables) are invalid and impracticable in the context of UN peacekeeping and would lead to estimates of the effects of UN operations that are largely a result of the assumptions of the statistical model rather than the data. We correct for the effects of nonrandom assignment with matching techniques on a sample of UN interventions in post-Cold-War conflicts and find that UN inter- ventions are indeed effective in the sample of post-civil-conflict interventions, but that UN interventions while civil wars are still ongoing have no causal effect.
Existing literature on state repression generally ignores the diversity that exists within autocracies. At present, different political systems are collapsed together, leaving unique approaches to political order unexamined. This limitation is important for policymakers, activists, and everyday citizens around the world seeking new ways to reduce government coercion. Within this study, the author explores an alternative path to decreasing repression — a `tyrannical peace'. Examining 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, he finds that single-party regimes are generally less repressive than other autocracies. Results also show that military governments decrease civil liberties restriction and the end of the Cold War has varied influences on repression, depending upon the form considered and whether this variable is interacted with another. There are thus alternative routes to peace, but these routes are not equally robust. The implications of this analysis are threefold. First, those interested in understanding why states restrict civil liberties and violate human rights must disaggregate their conceptions of system type and repression. Second, policymakers must adjust their approach to reducing state repression according to the type of authoritarian government they are confronted with. Third, advocates for human rights must accept that, in lieu of full democratization, alternatives exist.
A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that globalization promotes government repression of human rights: the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, or extra-judicial killing of citizens, activists, or dissidents by state security forces under the control of ruling state elites. This article employs a variant of Extreme Bounds Analysis in order to analyze the robustness of this growing body of important but contradictory inferences. It argues that (1) we can make robust empirical claims about the relationship between certain trade and investment indicators and government repression, but shows that (2) cumulative knowledge across studies nevertheless remains limited by the sensitivity of many indicators to conditioning sets of information. This problem stems from vaguely specified theoretical mechanisms linking economic processes to government repression and is of potentially great consequence for scholarship seeking to explain the causes of human rights violations, in particular, and the effects of economic globalization, in general.
Theory: Regimes respond to domestic threats with political repression. The precise nature of the domestic threat itself, however, is subject to discussion. Hypothesis: State repression is a function of either a unidimensional conception of domestic threats (i.e., where there is one attribute of political conflict considered by the regime) or one that is multidimensional in character (i.e., where there are several attributes considered), conditioned by certain political-economic characteristics: democracy, economic development, coercive capacity, dependency and lagged repression. Methods: A pooled cross-sectional time series analysis of 53 countries from 1948 to 1982. Results: Three different aspects of political conflict (conflict frequency, strategic variety, and deviance from cultural norm) are statistically significant in their relationship to repression, supporting the multidimensional conception of domestic threats. Additionally,,the degree to which the government is democratic significantly alters the pattern of relationships between political conflict and repressive behavior.
Negative campaigning is an important aspect of campaign competition but plays little or no role in existing models of campaigns. Within the context of plurality elections for a single office we model the incentives that affect the use of negative campaigning. Under simplifying but still quite general assumptions we show a number of results, including the following key conclusions: (1) for two-candidate competition the front-runner will engage in more positive and less negative campaigning than the opponent; (2) in a three-candidate contest with one candidate clearly trailing by a large margin and playing mainly a spoiler role, that candidate will only engage in positive campaigning; and (3) in any three-candidate contest, no candidate engages in negative campaigning against the weaker of his two opponents, so that to the extent there is negative campaigning, it will be directed against the front-runner or it will come from the front-runner. These results have direct empirical applications to multicandidate primaries and nonpartisan contests and can provide insight into recent general elections as well.
This article addresses the problem of escalated violence against minorities induced by interventions. The conventional interventionist wisdom rejects the very possibility of such escalation, claiming that violence against minorities is a monotonically decreasing function of interventions and insisting that it is third-party inaction that is the problem. In recent years, this position has been challenged by scholars, who have argued that the threat of intervention generates a moral hazard, providing minorities with perverse incentives to provoke the very violence the threat of intervention is supposed to deter. I argue that while many of the criticisms of the interventionist position contained in this argument are correct, it is nonetheless not fully convincing, because it fails to explain why the same threat of intervention that radicalizes minorities does not make the states that are the potential targets that much more moderate. Nor does it explain adequately why interveners are unable to make the threat of intervention conditional on the minorities’“good” behavior. I propose an alternative theory of escalation, which depicts third-party interventions as instances of incomplete information bargaining, demonstrating that escalation is a function of certain distributions of private information about the target-state’s level of brutality and the third party’s resolve, as well as the third party’s motives. The conflicts in Yugoslavia are used to illustrate and test the key implications of the model.
State repression includes harassment, surveillance/spying, bans, arrests, torture, and mass killing by government agents and/or affiliates within their territorial jurisdiction. Over the past 40 years, the systematic study of state repression has grown considerably. The development of this work, however, has been uneven. Though unified in their focus on the problem of order (i.e., trying to ascertain how political authorities wield coercive power amid potential and actual domestic challengers), different scholars tend to emphasize distinct aspects of the topic. Consequently, a great deal of progress has been made in specific areas but others have lagged behind. In this review, I attempt to identify the dominant traditions in the repression literature, the core empirical findings, and some persisting puzzles.
While globalization advocates have argued that market liberalization and economic integration will strengthen human rights by promoting economic development and facilitating the diffusion of rights-supportive norms and values, critics contend that the same processes threaten to undermine human rights through economic exploitation and the repressive actions of pro-growth governments. To contribute to this debate, the authors examine the relationship between one aspect of economic globalization, foreign direct investment, and human rights performance. But the authors go beyond existing studies of the human rights impact of foreign direct investment, which generally lump all forms of FDI into a single aggregate indicator, by focusing on one specific form of FDI, transnational mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This is a particularly important area to explore given the human rights literature's emphasis on multinational corporations as both potential violators of human rights and catalysts for improvements in human rights performance. This study examines the impact of cross-border M&As, which have become an increasingly prominent form of foreign direct investment over the last 25 years, on human rights performance globally from 1981 through 2006. The results of the statistical analysis show that transnational mergers and acquisitions have a positive impact on human rights conditions across several indicators, including physical integrity rights, empowerment rights, workers' rights, and women's economic rights. This positive impact of cross-border M&As is particularly pronounced in developing countries.
Social psychologist James Waller uncovers the internal and external factors that can lead ordinary people to commit extraordinary acts of evil. Waller offers a sophisticated and comprehensive psychological view of how anyone can potentially participate in heinous crimes against humanity. He outlines the evolutionary forces that shape human nature, the individual dispositions that are more likely to engage in acts of evil, and the context of cruelty in which these extraordinary acts can emerge. Eyewitness accounts are presented at the end of each chapter. In this second edition, Waller has revised and updated eyewitness accounts and substantially reworked Part II of the book, removing the chapter about human nature and evolutionary adaptations, and instead using this evolutionary perspective as a base for his entire model of human evil.
The birthplace of the nation-state and modern nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was supposed to be their graveyard at the end of the twentieth. Yet, far from moving beyond the nation-state, fin-de-siècle Europe has been moving back to the nation-state, most spectacularly with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia into a score of nationally defined successor states. This massive reorganisation of political space along national lines has engendered distinctive, dynamically interlocking, and in some cases explosive forms of nationalism. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and the 'new institutionalist' sociology, and comparing contemporary nationalisms with those of interwar Europe, Rogers Brubaker provides a theoretically sophisticated and historically rich account of one of the most important problems facing the 'New Europe'.
In the 1880s, Germany cultivated an alliance with the Ottoman Empire that led to a concession to build one of history’s most storied, diplomatically contentious, and financially challenging infrastructure projects: the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad. While Germany had many goals in pursuing the project, oil was the only way to make the railroad economic. Drawing on Ottoman archival sources, this article examines the policies and strategies of Sultan Abdülhamid II in relation to Germany’s attempt to develop Mesopotamian oil from German Emperor Wilhelm II’s visit to Istanbul in 1889 to the conclusion of Germany’s oil concession in 1906/7. It argues that Hamid pursued a pragmatic policy to develop and protect Ottoman oil from being dominated by the powers, especially the British Empire, and, in the process, seeks to reorient our understanding of great power interest in Middle East oil.
This paper investigates the influence of foreign direct investments on the probability of civil conflict onset, contributing to the debate on globalization and civil conflict. I relax the common assumption that all forms of globalization are equivalent in their effects on civil conflict. I also incorporate the cross-sectoral heterogeneity of investments in existing arguments about the socioeconomic externalities of foreign direct investments as determinants of conflict. With long time horizons and managerial control of their foreign affiliates, foreign direct investors are strategic players aiming to maximize profits and uniquely able to alter their environment through socio-political channels. This distinguishes FDI from trade and foreign portfolio investments. Through a combination of political agency and socio-economic influences on grievance and greed among domestic groups, some types of FDI are likely to alleviate the risk of civil conflict (service sector FDI), while others exacerbate it (primary sector FDI). Analyses using a new data set of sector-specific FDI stock, 1980–2013, lend empirical support to the argument. Showing that economic globalization can have simultaneous positive and negative externalities, these findings are informative for the current dialogue on the role of global markets in sustainable development.
According to the extant literature, state leaders pursue mass ethnic violence against minority groups in wartime if they believe that those groups are collaborating with an enemy. Treating the wartime leadership of a combatant state as a coherent unit, however, is misleading. Even in war, leaders differ in the degree to which they prioritize goals such as maintaining or expanding the territory of the state, and on whether they believe that minority collaboration with the enemy influences their ability to achieve those goals. Also, how leaders react to wartime threats from minority groups depends largely on the role that political organizations based on non-ethnic cleavages play in society. Depending on those cleavages, wartime minority collaboration may result in limited deportations and killings, ethnic cleansing, or minimal violence. A comparison of the policies of three multinational empires toward ethnic minority collaborators during World War I—the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italians, the Ottoman Empire and Armenians, and the Russian Empire and Muslims in the South Caucasus—illustrates this finding.
Using a new approach to ethnicity that underscores its relative territoriality,
Zeynep Bulutgil brings together previously separate arguments
that focus on domestic and international factors to offer a coherent
theory of what causes ethnic cleansing. The author argues that domestic
obstacles based on nonethnic cleavages usually prevent ethnic cleansing
whereas territorial conflict triggers this policy by undermining such
obstacles. The empirical analysis combines statistical evaluation based
on original data with comprehensive studies of historical cases in central
and eastern Europe as well as Bosnia in the 1990s. The findings demonstrate
how socioeconomic cleavages curb radical factions within
dominant groups whereas territorial wars strengthen these factions
and pave the way for ethnic cleansing. The author further explores
the theoretical and empirical extensions in the context of Africa. Its
theoretical novelty and broad empirical scope make this book highly
valuable to scholars of comparative and international politics alike.
Offering a comparative analysis of the mass genocides, politicides and ethnic cleansings of the twentieth century, this book sheds light on the occurrence as well as the magnitude of genocide. Based on the conviction that such comparative analysis may contribute towards the prevention of genocide in the future, Manus Midlarsky compares socio-economic circumstances and international contexts and includes in his analysis the Jews of Europe, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Tutsi in Rwanda, black Africans in Darfur, Cambodians, Bosnians, and the victims of conflict in Northern Ireland. © Manus I. Midlarsky 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This book is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing in the Bosnian wars from 1990 to the present. The book combines a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and later the return of refugees. Through the lens of critical geopolitics, which highlights the power of both geopolitical discourse and spatial strategies, the book focuses on the two attempts to remake the ethnic structure of Bosnia since 1991. The first attempt was by ascendant ethnonationalist forces that tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic structures of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. While these forces destroyed tens of thousands of homes and lives, they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. The second attempt followed the war. The international community, in league with Bosnian officials, tried to undo the demographic consequences of ethnic cleansing. This latter effort has moved in fits and starts, but as the book shows, it has re-made Bosnia, producing a country that has moved beyond the stark segregationist geography created by ethnic cleansing.
Using new micro-level data on violence in Eastern Ukraine, this paper evaluates the relative merits of 'identity-based' and 'economic' explanations of civil conflict. The first view expects rebellion to be most likely in areas home to the geographic concentration of ethnolinguistic minorities. The second expects more rebel activity where the opportunity costs of insurrection are low. Evidence from the armed conflict in Ukraine supports the second view more than the first. A municipality's prewar employment mix is a more robust predictor of rebel activity than local ethnolinguistic composition. Municipalities more exposed to trade shocks with Russia experienced a higher intensity of rebel violence throughout the conflict. Such localities also fell under rebel control earlier - and took longer for the government to liberate - than municipalities where the labor force was less dependent on exports to Russia.
While United Nations peacekeeping missions were created to keep peace and perform post-conflict activities, since the end of the Cold War peacekeepers are more often deployed to active conflicts. Yet, we know little about their ability to manage ongoing violence. This article provides the first broad empirical examination of UN peacekeeping effectiveness in reducing battlefield violence in civil wars. We analyze how the number of UN peacekeeping personnel deployed influences the amount of battlefield deaths in all civil wars in Africa from 1992 to 2011. The analyses show that increasing numbers of armed military troops are associated with reduced battlefield deaths, while police and observers are not. Considering that the UN is often criticized for ineffectiveness, these results have important implications: if appropriately composed, UN peacekeeping missions reduce violent conflict.
We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. Rebellion may be explained by atypically severe grievances, such as high inequality, a lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions in society. Alternatively, it might be explained by atypical opportunities for building a rebel organization. While it is difficult to find proxies for grievances and opportunities, we find that political and social variables that are most obviously related to grievances have little explanatory power. By contrast, economic variables, which could proxy some grievances but are perhaps more obviously related to the viability of rebellion, provide considerably more explanatory power.
The empirical literature that examines cross-national patterns of state repression seeks to discover a set of political, economic, and social conditions that are consistently associated with government violations of human rights. Null hypothesis significance testing is the most common way of examining the relationship between repression and concepts of interest, but we argue that it is inadequate for this goal, and has produced potentially misleading results. To remedy this deficiency in the literature we use cross-validation and random forests to determine the predictive power of measures of concepts the literature identifies as important causes of repression. We find that few of these measures are able to substantially improve the predictive power of statistical models of repression. Further, the most studied concept in the literature, democratic political institutions, predicts certain kinds of repression much more accurately than others. We argue that this is due to conceptual and operational overlap between democracy and certain kinds of state repression. Finally, we argue that the impressive performance of certain features of domestic legal systems, as well as some economic and demographic factors, justifies a stronger focus on these concepts in future studies of repression.
This article provides theoretical and empirical solutions to two connected puzzles in the study of foreign aid and human rights: Do foreign aid donors use aid sanctions to punish repressive states, and if so, why? I show that donors impose aid sanctions selectively. Aid sanctions typically occur when repressive states do not have close political ties to aid donors, when violations have negative consequences for donors and when violations are widely publicized. Using a data set of bilateral foreign aid to 118 developing countries between 1981 and 2004, I find that variation in these factors largely accounts for the differing aid sanctions that result from objectively similar rights violations by the governments of developing countries.
This study was undertaken in an effort to use data from European history to develop a model that might prove useful for describing, explaining, and predicting the patterns of political development and international behavior of some of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa. My interest in exploring the experiences of several European states grew out of dissatisfaction with efforts to build development theories exclusively upon knowledge of the contemporary developing areas in which the outcomes are unknown, where the periods of time with which we can work are often too short for testing any long-term development theories, and where we are often unable to distinguish between short-term, momentary changes and long-term, persistent patterns of growth or decay.
A large body of scholarly work has been devoted to the possible consequences of foreign military intervention for the target state. This literature, however, tends to be state-centric and mostly neglects the insight from gender-specific theoretical and empirical perspectives. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which military intervention affects women’s rights. It is argued that unilateral interventions are prone to diminishing women’s status by encouraging the persistence or creation of repressive regimes and contributing to political disorder in the target state. If the use of armed forces ever helps or causes no damage to women’s well-being, it will likely be during interventions led by intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). This is because IGO interventions are unlikely to protect or support an authoritarian, patriarchal political system. Furthermore, such multilateral missions will increase international awareness of women’s status along with other human rights issues in the target society, thereby creating more pressure on the government to enforce women’s rights. To empirically substantiate these arguments, three different indicators that tap socio-economic and political aspects of women’s status are used, including the indices of women’s economic, political, and social rights from the Cingranelli-Richards database. The results indicate that while women’s political and economic status suffer most during unilateral US interventions, IGO interventions are likely to have a positive influence on women’s political rights. Non-US unilateral interventions, on the other hand, are unlikely to cause any major change in women’s status. Finally, military interventions in general have no major statistically significant impact on women’s social rights.
We present what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first published set of annual out-of-sample forecasts of genocide and politicide based on a global dataset. Our goal is to produce a prototype for a real-time model capable of forecasting one year into the future. Building on the current literature, we take several important steps forward. We implement an unconditional two-stage model encompassing both instability and genocide, allowing our sample to be the available global data, rather than using conditional case selection or a case-control approach. We explore factors exhibiting considerable variance over time to improve yearly forecasting performance. And we produce annual lists of at-risk states in a format that should be of use to policymakers seeking to prevent such mass atrocities. Our out-of-sample forecasts for 1988–2003 predict 90.9% of genocide onsets correctly while also predicting 79.2% of non-onset years correctly, an improvement over a previous study using a case-control in-sample approach. We produce 16 annual forecasts based only on previous years’ data, which identify six of 11 cases of genocide/politicide onset within the top 5% of at-risk countries per year. We believe this represents substantial progress towards useful real-time forecasting of such rare events. We conclude by suggesting ways to further enhance predictive performance.
From 1900 to 1987, state, quasi-state, and stateless groups have killed in democide (genocide, massacres, extrajudicial executions, and the like) nearly 170,000,000 people. Case studies and quantitative analysis show that ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, economic development, levels of education, and cultural differences do not account for this killing. Rather, democide is best explained by the degree to which a regime is empowered along a democratic to totalitarian dimension and, second, the extent to which it is characteristically involved in war or rebellion. Combining these results with those that show that democracies do not make war on each other, the more democratic two nations are the less foreign violence between them, and that the more democratic a regime the less internal violence, strongly suggests that democracy is a general method of nonviolence.
The task of this study is to determine if certain political and socioeconomic variables have strong relationships with political repression conceptualized as disappearance, detention, torture, and political killings. The perspective of the study is from the question of why do people in power — with so many options available — choose repression as a method of rule. Repression is coded into numerical values from the State Department Country Reports, and then relationships with the degree of democracy, socioeconomic conditions, inequality, rate of economic change, and the level of economic development are tested in regression models. Significant relationships are found. The degree of democracy, the extent of inequality in society, and economic growth rate go a long way to explain and predict political repression in a parsimonious model.
How do income shocks affect armed conflict? Theory suggests two opposite effects. If labour is used to appropriate resources
violently, higher wages may lower conflict by reducing labour supplied to appropriation. This is the opportunity cost effect.
Alternatively, a rise in contestable income may increase violence by raising gains from appropriation. This is the rapacity
effect. Our article exploits exogenous price shocks in international commodity markets and a rich dataset on civil war in
Colombia to assess how different income shocks affect conflict. We examine changes in the price of agricultural goods (which
are labour intensive) as well as natural resources (which are not). We focus on Colombia's two largest exports, coffee and
oil. We find that a sharp fall in coffee prices during the 1990s lowered wages and increased violence differentially in municipalities cultivating more
coffee. This is consistent with the coffee shock inducing an opportunity cost effect. In contrast, a rise in oil prices increased both municipal revenue and violence differentially in the oil region. This is consistent with the
oil shock inducing a rapacity effect. We also show that this pattern holds in six other agricultural and natural resource
sectors, providing evidence that price shocks affect conflict in different directions depending on the type of the commodity.
Does economic coercion increase or decrease government respect for human rights in countries targeted with economic sanctions? If economic sanctions weaken the target regime's coercive capacity, human rights violations by the government should be less likely. If, on the contrary, sanctions fail to attenuate the coercive capacity of the target elites and create more economic difficulties and political violence among ordinary citizens, the government will likely commit more human rights violations. Focusing on competing views of why sanctions might improve or deteriorate human rights conditions, this article offers an empirical examination of the effect sanctions have on the physical integrity rights of citizens in target countries. Utilizing time-series, cross-national data for the period 1981—2000, the findings suggest that economic sanctions worsen government respect for physical integrity rights, including freedom from disappearances, extra-judicial killings, torture, and political imprisonment. The results also show that extensive sanctions are more detrimental to human rights than partial/selective sanctions. Economic coercion remains a counterproductive policy tool, even when sanctions are specifically imposed with the goal of improving human rights. Finally, multilateral sanctions have a greater overall negative impact on human rights than unilateral sanctions.
As the global economy expands, there is an increasing opportunity for trade between diverse regime types. Simultaneously, human rights have become an increasingly important issue as regimes are faced with greater pressure to adopt democratic policies. As a result, it is common for contemporary western political rhetoric to advocate the use of trade policies in an attempt to deter human rights violations. Within the political science literature, the liberal position asserts that increased trade will lead to improved human rights practices. Critics of this view, on the other hand, argue that trade policies do not alter a regime's treatment of its citizens. The extent to which the level of trade in a country affects human rights remains a point of contention. This paper sets out to empirically test the liberal perspective regarding the effect of trade on human rights practices. A pooled cross-sectional time series analysis is utilized to investigate the effects of trade on human rights. We examine developing countries from 1976 to 1996. We find support for the liberal position, specifically that trade is negatively related to human rights violations.
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.
Does peacekeeping intervention improve the human rights situation in states with a history of civil war? While this question has received a myriad of attention and debate within the human rights community, there have been relatively few studies that attempt to answer this question. Examining the characteristics of peacekeeping following civil war from 1980 to 2004, this article finds that peacekeeping can both encourage and undermine respect for human rights. Specifically, the mission and activities of peacekeepers matter. These findings support the human rights community's stance that peacekeeping can be problematic but holds promise for human rights in post-conflict states. [End Page 49]
Why do some wars result in the intentional killing of large numbers
of civilians? In this article we examine the incidence of mass killing
in all wars from 1945 to 2000. In the statistical analysis of our data
set of 147 wars, we find strong evidence supporting our hypothesis that
mass killing is often a calculated military strategy used by regimes
attempting to defeat major guerrilla insurgencies. Unlike conventional
military forces, guerrilla armies often rely directly on the local
civilian population for logistical support. Because guerrilla forces
are difficult to defeat directly, governments facing major guerrilla
insurgencies have strong incentives to target the guerrillas'
civilian base of support. We find that mass killing is significantly
more likely during guerrilla wars than during other kinds of wars. In
addition, we find that the likelihood of mass killing among guerrilla
conflicts is greatly increased when the guerrillas receive high levels
of active support from the local population or when the insurgency
poses a major military threat to the regime. a
b
This article reports a test of a structural model of the antecedents of genocide and politicide (political mass murder). A case-control research design is used to test alternative specifications of a multivariate model that identifies preconditions of geno-/politicide. The universe of analysis consists of 126 instances of internal war and regime collapse that began between 1955 and 1997, as identified by the State Failure project. Geno-/politicides began during 35 of these episodes of state failure. The analytic question is which factors distinguish the 35 episodes that led to geno-/politicides from those that did not. The case-control method is used to estimate the effects of theoretically specified domestic and international risk factors measured one year prior to the onset of geno-/politicide. The optimal model includes six factors that jointly make it possible to distinguish with 74% accuracy between internal wars and regime collapses that do and those that do not lead to geno-/politicide. The conclusion uses the model to assess the risks of future episodes in 25 countries.
This article examines the effect of foreign armed intervention on human rights conditions in target countries. It is argued that military intervention contributes to the rise of state repression by enhancing the state’s coercive power and encouraging more repressive behavior, especially when it is supportive or neutral towards the target government. Results from bivariate probit models estimated on time-series cross-section data show that supportive and neutral interventions increase the likelihood of extra-judicial killing, disappearance, political imprisonment, and torture. Hostile interventions increase only the probability of political imprisonment. The involvement of an intergovernmental organization or a liberal democracy as an intervener is unlikely to make any major difference in the suggested negative impact of intervention.
We show that democratic change may be triggered by transitory economic shocks. Our approach uses within-country variation in rainfall as a source of transitory shocks to sub-Saharan African economies. We find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. This result is consistent with the economic approach to political transitions, where transitory negative shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Instrumental variables estimates indicate that following a transitory negative income shock of 1 percent, democracy scores improve by 0.9 percentage points and the probability of a democratic transition increases by 1.3 percentage points.
With the end of the Cold War economic issues moved to the fore of the international agenda. The integration of markets, dominated by multinational corporations and orchestrated by international financial institutions, has many concerned for the political and economic rights of the common citizen. This is a comprehensive cross-national study examining the effect of globalization on the attainment of the subgroup of human rights known as personal integrity rights. The impact of global economic patterns on the attainment of these rights is mixed.
This study examines the relationship between foreign economic capital and the level of government respect for two types of human rights in developing countries. Two opposing schools of thought offer explanations as to what this relationship might be like. According to the liberal neoclassical school, the acceptance of liberal economic doctrine will provide positive political benefits to developing countries. The “dependency” school, on the other hand, argues that because ties between core and periphery elites give governments in developing nations an incentive to repress, human rights conditions will worsen as foreign economic penetration increases. The results of previous empirical queries into this matter have been mixed. In contrast to most studies, we focus on a broader measure of foreign economic capital, including foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, debt, and official development assistance. Using ordered logit analysis on a cross-national sample of forty-three developing countries from 1981 to 1995, we discover systematic evidence of an association between foreign economic penetration and government respect for two types of human rights, physical integrity rights and political rights and civil liberties. Of particular interest is the finding that both foreign direct investment and portfolio investment are reliably associated with increased government respect for human rights.
Research on human rights consistently points to the importance of democracy in reducing the severity and incidence of personal integrity abuses. The prescriptive implications of this finding for policy makers interested in state building have been somewhat limited, however, by a reliance on multidimensional measures of democracy. Consequently, a policy maker emerges from this literature confident that “democracy matters” but unclear about which set(s) of reforms is likely to yield a greater human rights payoff. Using data from the Polity IV Project, we examine what aspects of democracy are most consequential in improving a state's human rights record. Analysis of democracy's dimensions elicits three findings. First, political participation at the level of multiparty competition appears more significant than other dimensions in reducing human rights abuses. Second, improvements in a state's level of democracy short of full democracy do not promote greater respect for integrity rights. Only those states with the highest levels of democracy, not simply those conventionally defined as democratic, are correlated with better human rights practices. Third, accountability appears to be the critical feature that makes full-fledged democracies respect human rights; limited accountability generally retards improvement in human rights.
Democratic and autocratic states routinely violate their international agreements protecting human rights. Scholars typically link ratification and compliance behavior theoretically but test their models separately; however, if the behaviors are jointly determined then we should treat them that way empirically. We consider how domestic judiciaries influence the joint choice to ratify and comply with international human rights regimes. Using data on the ratification status of states under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), states’ torture practices, and a series of measures of judicial effectiveness, we examine whether legal institutions are likely to constrain state behavior and by implication raise the costs of ratification.