Kate Cronin-Furman’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

Quantitative research on violence against civilians relies extensively on “off-the-shelf” data, such as the widely cited Uppsala Conflict Data Program's (UCDP) One-Sided Violence dataset. We show that, due to data collection and coding protocols that privilege government narratives of violence, such data often reproduces statist biases pervasive in the international system. These dynamics are particularly visible when civilian deaths result from airstrikes, shelling, and other forms of long-range bombardment. Such capabilities are disproportionately possessed by states, yet conservative coding practices, combined with government control over information and access restrictions, dictate that UCDP consistently codes civilian deaths at the hands of governments as “battle-related” or incidental rather than deliberate targeting. We analyze patterns in the UCDP data release, version 23.1, using evidence from Sri Lanka and Ethiopia to illustrate these patterns.

On July 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) will mark the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute, its founding treaty. The Statute constituted a remarkable transfer of authority from sovereign states to an international institution: The ICC is the first permanent court charged with prosecuting individuals, including senior political and military leaders, for atrocity crimes. Per the Statute, the ICC was designed with the goals of ending impunity for these crimes, contributing to their prevention, and delivering justice to victims. To what extent has the ICC achieved these and other goals in the Rome Statute? The ICC’s upcoming anniversary provides an opportune moment to examine this question and take stock of the Court’s performance. This special issue of the Journal of Human Rights addresses this question from an empirical perspective, focusing on two themes: (1) the ICC’s relations with states, which critically condition its operations and impact, (2) the Court’s effectiveness in achieving the goals outlined in the Rome Statute, specifically ending impunity and mitigating violence.

Over the course of six months in 1986, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) eliminated their rival militant organizations, despite being significantly outgunned and outmanned by some of these groups. Relying primarily on contemporaneous accounts in Tamil and English, this article traces the process by which the LTTE became the primary avatar of Tamil nationalism, and explores the question of why consolidation unfolded so violently in this case. We argue that the answer lies in the LTTE’s successful portrayal of this violence as order-upholding rather than destructive, and attribute their ability to do this to the fact that much of the population perceived the LTTE as the most legitimate user of violence among the militants.

Survivors of systematic violations of human rights abuses carry with them the evidence of their victimization: photographs of the missing, news clippings, copies of police reports. In some contexts, collecting and preserving these documents is part of an effort to claim benefits, such as official victim status or reparations, from the state. In others, it serves as a record of and rebuke to the state’s inaction. In this article, through a comparative case study of victim mobilization in Colombia and Sri Lanka, we explore how these dynamics play out in contexts with high and low (respectively) levels of state action on transitional justice. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in both contexts, we examine grassroots documentation practices with an eye toward how they reflect the strategic adaptation of international transitional justice norms to specific contexts. We also examine how they organize relationships among individuals, the state, and notions of justice in times of transition from war and dictatorship. We argue that, beyond the strategic engagement with and/or rebuke of the state, these documents are also sites of ritual and memory for those who collect them.

Preventing and mitigating mass atrocities is a critical challenge in international security. But international interventions to stop mass atrocities have met with mixed success, and the academic literature offers limited guidance on how to improve this record. We argue that more attention must be paid to the nature of violence, specifically whether violence targets identity groups as such or political opponents of the perpetrator more broadly. Using Krain's (2017) data on interventions and mass atrocities, we test for heterogeneous effects of interventions by violence type. We find that while antiperpetrator military interventions can reduce the severity of identity-based violence, nonmilitary actions have negligible effects. By contrast, in cases of politicide, “naming and shaming” is effective, while military intervention is not; neutral and properpetrator military interventions and economic sanctions are ineffective regardless of violence type. We conclude that intervention strategies should be more narrowly tailored on the basis of violence type.

Why do repressive states create human rights institutions that cost them money and political capital but fail to silence international criticism? The academic literature assumes that states engaging in disingenuous human rights behavior are hoping to persuade (or deceive) liberal Western states and international advocates. But if human rights promoters in the West are the target audience for the creation of these half measures institutions, the strategy appears puzzlingly miscalculated. It reveals that the repressive state is sensitive to international opinion, and often results in increased pressure. The author argues that states engaging in human rights half measures are playing to a different, previously overlooked audience: swing states that can act as veto points on multilateral efforts to enforce human rights. The article illustrates these dynamics with a case study of Sri Lanka’s response to international pressure for postwar justice. The author shows that although the creation of a series of weak investigative commissions was prompted by pressure from Western governments and ngo s, it was not an attempt to satisfy or hoodwink these actors. Instead, it was part of a coalition-blocking strategy to convince fellow developing states on the UN Human Rights Council to oppose the creation of an international inquiry and to give them the political cover to do so.

Why do governments and militaries publicly condemn and prosecute particular forms of abuse? This article explores the Sri Lankan government's decision to promote limited legal accountability for state-perpetrated rape committed in a country otherwise renowned for widespread impunity. We argue that rather than representing a turn against impunity, the symbolic stance against conflict-related sexual violence in a small number of high-profile cases served an explicitly politico-military agenda. The state deployed legal accountability in specific cases to garner political legitimacy among key domestic audiences. The Sri Lankan government drew on the symbolism of female victimhood to mobilize support at a time when support for military counterinsurgency was waning. We show that governments can uniquely instrumentalize sexual violence cases to establish moral authority and territorial legitimacy. Through an examination of the domestic legal response to state-perpetrated human rights abuses, we illustrate the many ways in which women's bodies—and the law—can be mobilized in war to serve military ends.

The diversity of political spaces, availability of cheap labor, ease of access to powerful figures, and safety net of a foreign passport attract researchers to the developing world. However, environments of extreme state weakness and ongoing conflict permit research behavior that would be frowned on in the global north. We suggest that weak regulatory authority in conflict-affected states offers foreign academics opportunities that are not available when states have greater reach or capacity. Qualitative researchers may find requests to interview victims or perpetrators of wartime violence granted with ease. Experimenters can coerce under-resourced NGOs to pursue interventions at odds with their organizational mandates. We posit that conflict contexts can constitute permissive environments in which researchers can engage in conduct that would be considered deeply problematic at home. Because studying political violence can require firsthand research on aspects of political life not easily observed elsewhere, this article offers a set of guidelines to foster more ethical and responsible research practices.

Despite high hopes that the proliferation of international justice mechanisms represents progress toward the maintenance of international peace and security, claims about the ability of prosecutions to prevent future atrocities remain largely unexamined. These claims rely on undertheorized assumptions about both the operation of deterrence and the commission of mass atrocity. This article surveys the theory of criminal deterrence in order to assemble a more clearly specified set of expectations about how deterrence might be expected to operate in the international arena. It invokes social science findings that mass atrocity commission is motivated by different logics across cases to suggest that these differences are relevant to the potential extent of a deterrent effect. It considers the current prosecutorial policy of the International Criminal Court and suggests that, given the comparative lack of certainty and severity of sanction represented by the Court's prosecutions, as well as the selection of perpetrators with powerful incentives to offend, current prosecutorial policy is not well-targeted at producing a deterrent effect. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.