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The Politics of Punishment: Why Dictators Join the International Criminal Court
Abstract
Scholars commonly argue that international law and organizations promote democracy by helping dictators to credibly commit to accountability, individual rights, and transparency. Yet dictators routinely join treaties and international organizations without transitioning to democracy. International law and organizations can generate asymmetric costs for domestic actors because international rules often apply to both governments and non-state actors, yet dictators can limit how these rules are upheld at the domestic and international level. We argue that dictators are most likely to join such treaties and international organizations when they face strong domestic political competition. We illustrate our argument using the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has extensive powers to prosecute individuals for international crimes, including crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. We show that ICC investigations and prosecutions have become a tool for incumbent dictators to target their domestic opponents. We examine the implications of our theory for multiple outcome variables, including the decision to join the ICC, violence, and the survival of dictators in power. Our evidence suggests that dictators are most likely to join the ICC when they face strong political opponents and are subsequently less likely to commit violence and more likely to survive in office.
Rising authoritarianism, far-right parties and violent political movements in the 21st century prompt scholars and practitioners to revisit two foundational assumptions in the transitional justice field, which was established in the 20th century amid the third wave of democratization. The first is that transitional justice is a consequence and a cause of democratic transition and consolidation. The second is that transitional justice has been a successful global project. Current political developments challenge us to take stock of the field and consider the implications for current and future scholarship and practice. In this introduction to the ‘Afterlives of Transitional Justice’ special issue of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ), we first reflect on the many forms (‘lives’) that transitional justice has taken over the decades. The contributions address transitional justice’s life in three ways: as the transition to democracy, as the tools and processes themselves and as an academic and practice field. We then consider evolution and change in transitional justice (‘afterlives’). In increasingly perilous times for human rights, we hope that the insights gathered in these pages will help affected communities, activists, practitioners, policymakers and scholars look back in order to move forward and uphold the promise ‘Never again!’
Can international organizations (IOs) boost support for their authority? We consider the effectiveness of appeals to the principle of complementarity, which holds that IOs only act when domestic institutions fail. Supporters of IOs like the International Criminal Court (ICC) frequently use complementarity as an argument to rally support for international action and spur domestic action. We evaluate the effectiveness of complementarity arguments using the largest survey experiment on the ICC to date, with more than 10,000 participants in five countries whose cooperation could be pivotal for the Court: Georgia, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. We find only modest evidence that complementarity arguments improve public support for either ICC investigations or domestic investigations – effects which vary across countries. This suggests that a major argument thought to legitimate IOs may not persuade global publics. Instead, an IO’s negative judgment of domestic actions may be perceived as paternalistic or, in Global South contexts, neocolonial.
Negara Isral yang menjadi aktor pada konflik Palestina tidak sedikit menjadi bahan pemberitaan dan pembingkaian oleh media-media internasional. Penelitian-penelitian yang pernah dilakukan mengenai framing belum dibahasa secara komprehensif, terlebih lagi mengenai independensi pemberitaan media yang terafiliasi dengan negara. Penelitian ini berfokus pada pertanyaan bagaimana framing Israel oleh media jordantimes.com yang terafiliasi dengan Jordania yang juga memiliki hubungan diplomatik dengan Israel. Untuk menjawab pertanyaan ini, penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan deskriptif kualitatif dan metode framing Murray Edelman yang berfokus pada kategorisasi dan rubrikasi sebuah pemberitaan media. Temuan dalam penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa hubungan diplomatik Jordania dengan Israel tidak berdampak terhadap independensi pemberitaan jordantimes.com. Bahkan tidak sedikit dalam pemberitaan jordantimes.com menunjukkan Israel adalah aktor krimninal internasional dan negara penjajah. Konteks tersebut dapat dilihat melalui kategorisasi Israel sebagai aktor kriminal internasional yang telah melakukan genosida dan kejahatan terorganisir. Kemudian rubrikasi Israel sebagai negara penjajah yang merampas wilayah teritorial Palestina dan melanggar peraturan hukum internasional.
Can international organizations (IOs) boost support for their authority? We consider the effectiveness of appeals to the principle of complementarity, which holds that IOs only act when domestic institutions fail. Supporters of IOs like the International Criminal Court (ICC) frequently use complementarity as an argument to rally support for international action and spur domestic action. We evaluate the effectiveness of complementarity arguments using the largest survey experiment on the ICC to date, with more than 10,000 participants in five countries whose cooperation could be pivotal for the Court: Georgia, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. We find only modest evidence that complementarity arguments improve public support for either ICC investigations or domestic investigations – effects which vary across countries. This suggests that a major argument thought to legitimate IOs may not persuade global publics. Instead, an IO’s negative judgment of domestic actions may be perceived as paternalistic or, in Global South contexts, neocolonial.
The United States—an architect of international criminal tribunals in the twentieth century—has since moderated its involvement in international justice. Striking to many observers is the United States’ failure to join the International Criminal Court—the institutional successor to the tribunals the nation helped install in Germany, Japan, the Balkans, and Rwanda. Interestingly, the US public’s support of the ICC increases yearly despite the government’s ambivalence about, and even hostility toward, the Court. Drawing on the US foreign policy public opinion literature, I theorize that human rights frames increase support for joining the ICC among Americans, whereas national interest frames decrease support. I administer an online survey experiment to evaluate these expectations and find consistent support. I additionally test hypotheses from the framing literature in American politics regarding the effect of exposure to two competing frames. I find that participants exposed to competing frames hold more moderate positions than participants exposed to a single frame but differ appreciably from the control group. Crucially, I find that participants’ beliefs about international organizations’ effectiveness and impartiality are equally, if not more, salient than the treatments. Thus, the ICC may be able to mobilize support and pressure policy change by demonstrating effectiveness and impartiality.
Scholars have paid increasing attention to democratic backsliding, yet efforts to explain this phenomenon remain inchoate. This article seeks to place the study of democratic backsliding on sturdier conceptual, operational, and theoretical foundations. Conceptually, the challenge of backsliding is to define changes that take place within a political regime. Methodologically, the challenge involves measurement of intraregime changes, as alternative coding schemes change the population of units that have experienced democratic backsliding. Theoretical challenges are dual: First, despite a rich and diverse literature, we lack readily available theories to explain backsliding, and second, the theoretical debates that do exist - centered on the causes of democratic transitions, democratic breakdowns, authoritarian resilience, and democratic consolidation - remain unresolved. We consider how these theories might be called into service to explain backsliding. By doing so, the article aims to set the terms of the debate to create a common focal point around which research can coalesce.
A broad class of theories, applied to a wide array of substantive issues, argues that international institutions facilitate compliance by mobilizing procompliance domestic groups. I develop a general model of political contestation over compliance policy in which institutions mobilize both pro-and anticompliance groups. The model predicts that institutions have the greatest ability to induce compliance when the groups have similar values to winning a compliance contest or costs to effort, ex ante. Institutions have a weaker marginal effect when groups are imbalanced. I demonstrate features of the model using the Kenyan experience with the International Criminal Court. The ICC cemented the political alliance of two anticompliance candidates. The ICC's indictments had the greatest effect on support for the most prominent indicted candidate in regions of Kenya where pro-and anti-indictment forces were balanced. Features of domestic political contests are a key moderator of the effectiveness of international institutions.
This article considers how international criminal justice administered by the International Criminal Court (ICC) affects the possibility of negotiated, peaceful transitions of power in autocracies. We argue that a strong international criminal tribunal can deter dictators’ decisions to peacefully relinquish their power. It does so when the dictator in question has faced a relatively violent opposition, one that was ready to strike a deal with the dictator promising him amnesty in exchange for stepping down. Facing an opposition that “has skeletons in its closet,” the dictator will peacefully exit his office only under a weak ICC regime. We use a cross-national time-series data set spanning 1998 to 2007 to test our theory and find that under a weak ICC regime, the more skeletons the opposition has in its own closet, the more likely is the dictator to peacefully step down from office. Interestingly, this relationship holds, to a large extent, across various levels of dictator’s culpability. If the ICC is strong, the number of skeletons the opposition has in its closet has, for the most part, no effect on the dictator’s likelihood of stepping down.
I assess the credibility of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as an impartial and independent institution by demonstrating how state behaviour towards the Court has politicised prosecutions. There are two mechanisms by which prosecutions have become politicised: the referrals of conflict situations to the ICC by political actors, i.e. States Parties to the Rome Statute and United Nations Security Council, and the prospect and degree of state cooperation with the Court. Consequently prosecutions have targeted only one side of the conflict and reflect the strategic political interests of the referring actors but promise a greater degree of state cooperation. The case studies selected here present variation in the nature of referrals and degree of cooperation, making for an instructive comparison and revealing an identifiable pattern of politicisation.
International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil society activism. If so, treaties may be failing to make a difference in those states most in need of reform — the world's worst abusers — even though they have been the targets of the human rights regime from the very beginning. The authors address this question of compliance by focusing on the behavior of repressive states in particular. Through a series of cross-national analyses on the impact of two key human rights treaties, the article demonstrates that (1) governments, including repressive ones, frequently make legal commitments to human rights treaties, subscribing to recognized norms of protection and creating opportunities for socialization and capacity-building necessary for lasting reforms; (2) these commitments mostly have no effects on the world's most terrible repressors even long into the future; (3) recent findings that treaty effectiveness is conditional on democracy and civil society do not explain the behavior of the world's most abusive governments; and (4) realistic institutional reforms will probably not help to solve this problem.
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International law shapes nearly every aspect of our lives. It affects the food we eat, the products we buy, the rights we hold, and the wars we fight. Yet international law is often believed to be the exclusive domain of well-heeled professionals with years of legal training. This text uses clear, accessible writing and contemporary political examples to explain where international law comes from, how actors decide whether to follow international law, and how international law is upheld using legal and political tools. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, this book is accessible to a wide audience and is written for anyone who wants to understand how global rules shape and transform international politics. Each chapter is framed by a case study that examines a current political issue, such as the bombing of Yemen or the use of chemical weapons in Syria, encouraging students to draw connections between theoretical concepts and real-world situations. The chapters are modular and self-contained, and each is paired with multiple Supplemental Cases: edited and annotated judicial opinions. Accompanied by ready-to-use PowerPoint slides and a testbank for instructors.
American policymakers have been wary of the International Criminal Court (ICC) since its founding. United States’ opposition is largely due to the fear that the ICC might initiate biased investigations that target members of the American military scattered across the globe. The recent ICC investigation into war crimes committed on Afghanistan’s territory during the American occupation has produced a new surge of interest in this topic. But do ICC investigations, in fact, target America’s military? Using a global sample of cases the ICC could plausibly investigate and data on the locations of all US foreign military installations, I examine how the presence of American troops in a country affects the likelihood of an ICC investigation. Contrary to the common narrative of anti-American bias, the estimated effects of US military presence are statistically indistinguishable from zero and substantively negligible. These results highlight the need to rethink America’s combative approach to the ICC.
Incumbents in electoral regimes often retain power despite having to regularly compete in multiparty elections. We examine a specific channel through which incumbents can seek to prevent the emergence of a strong opposition that might threaten them in future elections. We present a formal model demonstrating that incumbents can strategically induce opposition fragmentation by appointing some opposition members to ministerial cabinet positions. Opposition politicians who have the opportunity to secure a cabinet position in an incumbent’s government tend to compete for office independently rather than coalescing into broad-based parties or electoral alliances. The model shows that weaker incumbents are more likely to rely on this cooptation strategy. Using original data on presidential elections across African countries during 1990–2016, we show that past cooptation of opposition politicians is associated with a more fragmented opposition field in subsequent elections.
Do international human rights treaties constrain governments from repressing their populations? Government authorities routinely ignore their international obligations, and countries with poor human rights records join international treaties and yet continue to violate rights. Contentious Compliance presents a new theory of treaty effects founded on the idea that governments repress as part of a domestic conflict with potential or actual dissidents. By introducing dissent actions like peaceful protests, strikes, boycotts, or direct violent attacks on government, Contentious Complianceimproves understanding of when states will violate rights-and when international laws will work to protect people. Formal theory and extensive data analyses show that when political leaders have the highest incentives to repress-namely when political leaders receive large benefits from retaining power and domestic courts are relatively poor at constraining the executive-human rights treaties alter the structure of the strategic conflict between political authorities and potential dissidents, significantly decreasing government repression and increasing the likelihood of mobilized dissent actions.
Cambridge Core - International Relations and International Organisations - States of Justice - by Oumar Ba
This article contributes to an understanding of why autocrats have accepted the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Leveraging their ability to obstruct their own prosecution, autocrats have traded off the risk of unwanted prosecutions against the deterrent threat that prosecutions pose to political rivals and patrons of their enemies conspiring to oust them. The risk of unwanted prosecutions and the court's deterrent threat both arise because ICC prosecutions credibly communicate guilt for international crimes to capital-disbursing democracies, which may, insofar as possible, use leader-specific economic statecraft to prevent the administration of foreign states by those whom the court signals are guilty of international crimes. Analysis using fixed effects and matching shows that a greater reliance on capital publicly financed by democracies increased the probability that a state accepted the court's jurisdiction only when it was an autocracy (1998–2017). ICC jurisdiction also lengthened the tenure of autocrats and reduced the severity of civil conflict in autocracies.
International law, though formally neutral among regime types, has mainly been a product of liberal democracies since World War II. In light of recent challenges to the liberal international order, this Article asks, what would international law look like in an increasingly authoritarian world? As compared with democratic countries, authoritarians emphasize looser cooperation, negotiated settlements, and rules that reinforce regime survival. This raises the possibility of authoritarian international law, designed to extend authoritarian rule across time and space.
Autocratic governments hold a preference for opacity. Autocracies are less transparent than democracies and a closed informational environment preserves autocratic regimes from mass unrest. Yet, autocracies vary widely in the extent to which they disclose economic information. In this article, we offer an explanation for why some autocrats choose to disclose. We contend that, paradoxically, some autocratic leaders may benefit from increasing the capacity of the populace to mobilize. In so doing, autocratic leaders threaten rival members of the elite, reducing the risk of elite challenges and increasing their freedom of maneuver. We contend that transparency acts as one mechanism toward these ends. We formalize these intuitions and demonstrate empirically that leaders in transparent autocracies enjoy a reduced hazard of removal via coup relative to their opaque counterparts. Personalistic dictators and entrenched autocrats—who suffer the smallest risk of sanctioning by their elites—are particularly unlikely to disclose information.
Media coverage of civil wars often focuses on the most gruesome atrocities and the most extreme conflicts, which might lead one to think that all civil wars involve massive violence against civilians. In truth, many governments and rebel groups exercise restraint in their fighting, largely avoiding violence against civilians in compliance with international law. Governments and rebel groups make strategic calculations about whether to target civilians by evaluating how domestic and international audiences are likely to respond to violence. Restraint is also a deliberate strategic choice: governments and rebel groups often avoid targeting civilians and abide by international legal standards to appeal to domestic and international audiences for diplomatic support. This book presents a wide range of evidence of the strategic use of violence and restraint, using original data on violence against civilians in civil wars from 1989 to 2010 as well as in-depth analyses of conflicts in Azerbaijan, El Salvador, Indonesia, Sudan, Turkey, and Uganda.
In recent years, several oppressive leaders have been arrested and extradited to international courts. What are the consequences of this global justice cascade? I address this question by examining patterns of exile. I show that the justice cascade has a differential effect on leaders based on their culpability (whether they presided over atrocity crimes). In the past, culpable and nonculpable leaders went into exile at virtually identical rates. Today, however, culpable leaders are about six times less likely to flee abroad because exile no longer guarantees a safe retirement. These findings raise stark implications for existing research that debates whether international justice deters atrocities or prolongs conflicts. My results about exiled leaders, I explain, imply that the justice cascade should deter atrocities and prolong conflicts. Thus, instead of debating whether international justice is helpful or harmful, future scholarship should carefully consider the trade‐offs it creates.
This article examines the relationship between third-party actors and the intentional targeting of non-combatants in interstate war. It argues that war participants kill fewer civilians in war when their expectation of third-party punishment is high. Combatants will anticipate a high likelihood of third-party sanctions when their alliance and trade networks are dominated by third parties that have ratified international treaties prohibiting the intentional targeting of non-combatants. The study hypothesizes that war combatants kill fewer civilians in war as the strength of ratifiers within their alliance and trade networks increases. Quantitative tests on a dataset of all interstate wars from 1900–2003 provide strong statistical and substantive support for this hypothesis.
The trial of former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has provoked major controversy in Co" te d'Ivoire and the wider Ivorian diaspora. While both pro-Gbagbo and pro-Ouattara sides reportedly committed abuses during the 2010-2011crisis, the ICC Prosecutor pursued a sequenced prosecutorial strategy. Critics deplore the alleged lack of perceived impartiality in this approach. This article provides a critical assessment of this strategy and offers a novel theoretical framework to glean new findings around the norm of prosecutorial impartiality. First, the controversy around the Prosecutor's strategy arguably reveals a tension between a 'legalist' and a 'political' vision of impartiality.While the Prosecutor's strategy is in accordance with the legalist vision, its actions are criticized based on the political vision. The dispute between the Prosecutor and her critics thus reflects the tension between being impartial and being seen as impartial, or between the demands of procedural impartiality and political neutrality. Secondly, the Office of the Prosecutor's (OTP) approach to the Co" te d'Ivoire situation is arguably the product of a 'tactical rapport' between the OTP and the government, i.e. of the relationship between the tactics used by the OTP to operate as an effective prosecutorial body and the tactics used by national authorities to navigate the post-crisis transition. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
We study coordination dynamics in the context of two groups under the shadow of political instability. One group (regime opponents) prefers a change in regime and can participate in an attack, which if sufficiently large, causes regime change. The other group (regime adherents) prefers the status quo and can support the regime, making it more resistant to attack. We derive and analyze the endogenously determined strength of the regime and isolate the strategic feedback between opponent coordination and adherent coordination. Because of this interrelated coordination dynamic we find that repression and co-optation are substitutes. In addition, we show that coordination frictions between regime adherents intensify the already disproportionate impact of public information. Moreover, public information affects individual actions in each group identically, regardless of disparities in the quality of private information available to members of each group. This implies that it is the least well-informed that determine the influence of public information.
Despite the International Criminal Court’s increased prominence in international politics, there remains marked variation in states’ cooperation with the ICC. This article asks why do states cooperate with the ICC following an indictment, arrest warrant or request for information, and how do these patterns of cooperation affect the Court’s ability to constrain state behavior? Using comparative case studies from Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Libya, we suggest that states’ cooperation with the ICC is a function of domestic political calculations, tempered by states’ international partners and ambitions and the ICC’s own learning process.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) was designed to try the worst war criminals for crimes against humanity, genocide and other instances of mass human suffering. By providing a permanent, international mechanism to hold perpetrators of mass human rights abuse accountable, the ICC is also meant to be a deterrent—to prevent potential genocidaires from committing systematic human rights abuses in the first place. But what if the effect is actually quite the opposite? While advocates of international justice have made conjectures about the effect of the ICC on stopping human rights abuses, the existing scholarship does not empirically test assumptions about the relationship between international criminal justice and violence. This article outlines the causal mechanisms by which the ICC could affect on-going violence and tests these assumptions using event count models of the relationship between the ICC and the level of violence against civilians in Libya during the 2011 crisis. These analyses suggest that the ICC’s involvement in conflict does have a dampening effect on the level of mass atrocities committed. The results also call for a broad and sustained research agenda on the effect of international accountability efforts on on-going violence.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is responsible for prosecuting crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. Despite the potential for the ICC to deter human rights abuses, scholars and policy makers are divided on the effectiveness of it. This debate, however, is plagued by some important theoretical and empirical limitations. I address the problems in the literature and evaluate whether the ICC can prevent human rights abuses. I argue that the ICC can deter governments from committing human rights violations by imposing a variety of costs on them throughout their investigations that decrease their expected payoffs for engaging in human rights abuses. Across a variety of statistical estimators that account for standard threats to inference and several anecdotes, I find strong support for my theoretical expectations; leaders from states that have ratified the Rome Statute commit lower levels of human rights abuses than nonratifier leaders.
Although scholarly consensus suggests that dissent causes repression, the behaviors are endogenous: governments and dissidents act in expectation of each other’s behavior. Empirical studies have not accounted well for this endogeneity. We argue that preventive aspects of repression meaningfully affect the relationship between observed dissent and repression. When governments use preventive repression, the best response to dissent that does occur is unclear; observed dissent does not meaningfully predict
responsive
repression. By contrast, governments that do not engage in
ex ante
repression will be more likely to do it
ex post
. We follow U.S. voting scholarship and propose a new instrument to model the endogeneity: rainfall. We couple rainfall data in African provinces and U.S. states with data on dissent and repression and find that dissent fails to have a significant effect on responsive repression in states that engage in preventive repression.
Seventeen million people have died in civil wars, and rebel violence has disrupted the lives of millions more. In a fascinating contribution to the active literature on civil wars, this book finds that some contemporary rebel groups actually comply with international law amid the brutality of civil conflicts around the world. Rather than celebrating the existence of compliant rebels, the author traces the cause of this phenomenon and argues that compliant rebels emerge when rebel groups seek legitimacy in the eyes of domestic and international audiences that care about humanitarian consequences and human rights. By examining rebel groups’ different behaviors, such as civilian killing, child soldiering, and allowing access to detention centers, Compliant Rebels offers key messages and policy lessons about engaging rebel groups with an eye toward reducing civilian suffering in war zones.
What drives politics in dictatorships? Milan W. Svolik argues that all authoritarian regimes must resolve two fundamental conflicts. First, dictators face threats from the masses over which they rule – this is the problem of authoritarian control. A second, separate challenge arises from the elites with whom dictators rule – this is the problem of authoritarian power-sharing. Crucially, whether and how dictators resolve these two problems is shaped by the dismal environment in which authoritarian politics takes place: in a dictatorship, no independent authority has the power to enforce agreements among key actors and violence is the ultimate arbiter of conflict. Using the tools of game theory, Svolik explains why some dictators, such as Saddam Hussein, establish personal autocracy and stay in power for decades; why leadership changes elsewhere are regular and institutionalized, as in contemporary China; why some dictatorships are ruled by soldiers, as Uganda was under Idi Amin; why many authoritarian regimes, such as PRI-era Mexico, maintain regime-sanctioned political parties; and why a country's authoritarian past casts a long shadow over its prospects for democracy, as the unfolding events of the Arab Spring reveal. When assessing his arguments, Svolik complements these and other historical case studies with the statistical analysis of comprehensive, original data on institutions, leaders, and ruling coalitions across all dictatorships from 1946 to 2008.
Of the many expectations attending the creation of the first permanent International Criminal Court, the greatest has been that the principle of complementarity would catalyse national investigations and prosecutions of conflict-related crimes and lead to the reform of domestic justice systems. Sarah Nouwen explores whether complementarity has had such an effect in two states subject to ICC intervention: Uganda and Sudan. Drawing on extensive empirical research and combining law, legal anthropology and political economy, she unveils several effects and outlines the catalysts for them. However, she also reveals that one widely anticipated effect – an increase in domestic proceedings for conflict-related crimes – has barely occurred. This finding leads to the unravelling of paradoxes that go right to the heart of the functioning of an idealistic Court in a world of real constraints.
Often dismissed as window-dressing, nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties, play an important role in non-democratic regimes. In a comprehensive cross-national study of all non-democratic states from 1946 to 2002 that examines the political uses of these institutions by dictators, Gandhi finds that legislative and partisan institutions are an important component in the operation and survival of authoritarian regimes. She examines how and why these institutions are useful to dictatorships in maintaining power, analyzing the way dictators utilize institutions as a forum in which to organize political concessions to potential opposition in an effort to neutralize threats to their power and to solicit cooperation from groups outside of the ruling elite. The use of legislatures and parties to co-opt opposition results in significant institutional effects on policies and outcomes under dictatorship.
This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. By several measures, civil and political rights, women’s rights, a right not to be tortured in government detention, and children’s rights improve, especially in the very large heterogeneous set of countries that are neither stable autocracies nor stable democracies. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.
Few scholars have systematically examined whether the world outside a state's borders can influence the prospects for democracy. Jon Pevehouse argues that regional organizations, such as the European Union and the Organization of American States, can have an important role in both the transition to, and the longevity of, democracy. Combining statistical analysis and case study evidence, Pevehouse finds that regional organizations can be a potent force for instilling and protecting democracy throughout the world.
Western intervention has become a ubiquitous feature of violent conflict in Africa. Humanitarian aid agencies, community peacebuilders, microcredit promoters, children's rights activists, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, the US military, and numerous others have involved themselves in African conflicts, all claiming to bring peace and human rights to situations where they are desperately needed. However, according to Adam Branch, Western intervention is not the solution to violence in Africa but, instead, can be a major part of the problem, often undermining human rights and even prolonging war and intensifying anti-civilian violence. Based on an extended case study of Western intervention into northern Uganda's twenty-year civil war, and drawing on his own extensive research and human rights activism there, this book lays bare the reductive understandings motivating Western intervention in Africa, the inadequate tools it insists on employing, its refusal to be accountable to African citizenries, and, most important, its counterproductive consequences for peace, human rights, and justice. In short, Branch demonstrates how Western interventions undermine the efforts Africans themselves are undertaking to end violence in their own communities. The book does not end with critique, however. Motivated by a commitment to global justice, it proposes concrete changes for Western humanitarian, peacebuilding, and justice interventions as well as a new normative framework for re-orienting the Western approach to violent conflict in Africa around a practice of genuine solidarity.
Research on human rights treaties has mostly reached depressingly similar conclusions – that such treaties and their resulting institutions have little or no impact on human rights. The International Criminal Court, however, possesses significant power to investigate and prosecute violations of international law that equip it with potentially more influence than previous human rights regimes. I suggest, however, that the impact of the ICC on human rights is conditioned by signatory governments’ commitment to good governance and acceptance of the role of the ICC in addressing violations of international law. I develop a two-stage model of ICC ratification and human rights abuse that shows that while many states have ratified the ICC Treaty, not all are committed to stopping the crimes under its jurisdiction. Rather, state commitment to human rights depends first on its commitment to the rule of law within its own borders. Second, commitment to human rights depends on states’ willingness to grant the ICC the powers necessary to carry out its mission. Through a number of statistical tests, I find strong support for these hypotheses on states’ human rights and propensity for violence.
Although they are arguably the worst violators of human rights, dictators sometimes commit to international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to appease their domestic opposition. Importantly, however, executives facing effective judiciaries must anticipate ex post costs that can arise when international treaties are likely to be enforced domestically. This suggests that one domestic institutiona political opposition partymay provide a dictator with incentives to commit to international human rights treaties and violate human rights, while anotheran effective domestic judiciarymay constrain the dictator's ability to violate human rights and incentivize him to avoid international commitment. How do dictators make choices about commitment to human rights law and respect for human rights when they face conflicting domestic incentives? Furthermore, how do these divergent incentives affect compliance when dictators do commit to international treaties? In this article, I argue that the domestic incentives dictators face to support the CAT and engage in torture are moderated in countries with effective domestic judiciaries.
The pursuit of material rewards, particularly foreign aid, is often cited as a motivation for the ratification of human rights treaties by developing countries with poor human rights records. This article suggests that proponents of this rewards thesis have misinterpreted the relationship between ratification and foreign aid. It argues that aid-receiving countries ratify human rights agreements not because they expect to be rewarded with increases in aid, but rather because they fear that having a poor human rights reputation leaves them at risk of being targeted for aid sanctions. Thus, ratification serves to deflect criticism of their human rights practices and makes it easier politically for donors to justify maintaining aid flows to human rights abusers. These claims are tested using data drawn from 152 aid-receiving countries during the years 1981–2010. No evidence is found to support the claim that states are rewarded with increases in aid after ratification occurs. However, levels of dependence on foreign aid and respect for human rights do appear to have an interactive effect on ratification. States with poorer human rights records tended to ratify more human rights treaties when they were more dependent on foreign aid.
Chapman, Terrence L. and Stephen Chaudoin (2012) Ratification Patterns and the International Criminal Court. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12005 © 2012 International Studies Association
What types of countries have ratified the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court? Because the court relies on state cooperation, it is a good example of a regime facing a “participation problem.” In order to be effective, the regime requires active members, but states that fear regime effectiveness will therefore find it potentially costly to join. We analyze the extent to which this problem plagues the ICC. We find that countries for whom compliance is likely to be easiest—democracies with little internal violence—are the most likely countries to join the ICC. On the other hand, countries with the most to fear from ICC prosecution, nondemocracies with weak legal systems and a history of domestic political violence, tend to avoid ratification. We contrast our findings with those of a recent article by Simmons and Danner (2010), arguing that ratification patterns show evidence of credible commitments. Our analysis across a breadth of evidence, both descriptive and multivariate, suggests caution toward arguments about the impact of the ICC on global practices and provides support for the notion that states strategically select themselves into supranational judicial agreements.
International human rights treaties are argued to increase both the likelihood of domestic mobilized dissent and judicial constraint. These pressures pull leaders in conflicting directions: mobilized challenges undermine a leader’s position in power, increasing incentives to repress; courts raise the probability of litigation, decreasing incentives to repress. We argue authorities balance these pressures based on their job security. Politically insecure leaders, desperate to retain power, repress to control the destabilizing effects of dissent. Secure leaders are less likely to fall to citizen pressures, but the probability of facing an effective judiciary weighs heavily in their expected costs. Consequently, they repress less to avoid litigation. We find empirical support for the implications of our formal theory using data on commitment to the UN Convention Against Torture. Treaties have no effect on repression in states with insecure leaders but have a positive effect on rights protection in states headed by secure leaders.
Why do some dictatorships establish institutions that may constrain their leaders? We argue that institutions promote the survival of dictatorships by facilitating authoritarian power-sharing. Specifically, institutions such as parties, legislatures, and advisory councils alleviate commitment and monitoring problems between the dictator and his allies caused by the secrecy in authoritarian governance. However, because authoritarian power-sharing succeeds only when it is backed by a credible threat of a rebellion by the dictator’s allies, institutions will be ineffective or break down when an imbalance of power within the ruling coalition undermines this threat’s credibility. Our arguments clarify the complex interaction between collective action, commitment, and monitoring problems in authoritarian governance. We use both historical and large-N data to assess new empirical predictions about the relationship between political institutions, leader survival, and the concentration of power in dictatorships.
Why do states build international courts, submit cases, and enforce court judgments? This article examines the role of a court that is neither a “decider” nor an “information provider.” Litigation is costly and does not reveal private information. The court’s ruling is not binding and bargaining can occur before and after the court has ruled. Nevertheless, an alternative dispute resolution mechanism emerges: court rulings can coordinate endogenous multilateral enforcement. Disinterested states will enforce to ensure that they can profitably use the court in the future. Accepting jurisdiction of the court allows a state to make efficiency-enhancing “trades,” winning high-value disputes in exchange for losing low-value disputes. This is possible because litigation is a screening device: states only sue when they derive relatively high value from the disputed asset. The use of the court as a coordination device for multilateral enforcement allows for the existence of a court with endogenous enforcement and jurisdiction.
Existing research has related civil war primarily to country-specific factors or processes that take place within individual states experiencing conflict. Many contemporary civil wars, however, display a trans- national character, where actors, resources, and events span national boundaries. This article challenges the 'closed polity' approach to the study of civil war, where individual states are treated as independent entities, and posits that transnational factors and linkages between states can exert strong influences on the risk of violent civil conflict. Previous research has shown that conflicts in a state's regional context can increase the risk of conflict, but the research has not distinguished between different varieties of transnational linkages that may underlie geographic contagion, and it has failed to consider the poten- tial influences of domestic attributes. The article develops and evaluates a series of hypotheses on how transnational factors can influence the risk of conflict and the prospects for maintaining peace in a con- ditional autologistic model, including country-specific factors often associated with civil wars. The results suggest that transnational linkages between states and regional factors strongly influence the risk of civil conflict. This, in turn, implies that the risk of civil war is not determined just by a country's internal or domestic characteristics, but differs fundamentally, depending on a country's linkages to other states.
To survive in office, dictators need to establish power-sharing arrangements with their ruling coalitions, which are often not credible. If dictators cannot commit to not abusing their “loyal friends”—those who choose to invest in the existing autocratic institutions rather than in forming subversive coalitions— they will be in permanent danger of being overthrown, both by members of the ruling elite and by outside rivals. This article explores the role of autocratic political parties and elections (both one-party and multiparty) in mitigating the commitment problem, making power-sharing between the dictator and his ruling coalition possible.
Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. What explains this oil curse? And can it be fixed? In this groundbreaking analysis, Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth--and how they can turn oil from a curse into a blessing. Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries' oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, they are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats--and twice as likely to descend into civil war--than countries without oil. The Oil Curseshows why oil wealth typically creates less economic growth than it should; why it produces jobs for men but not women; and why it creates more problems in poor states than in rich ones. It also warns that the global thirst for petroleum is causing companies to drill in increasingly poor nations, which could further spread the oil curse. This landmark book explains why good geology often leads to bad governance, and how this can be changed.