Human Rights Violations, Weak States, and Civil War (original) (raw)
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Human Rights Violations and Violent Internal Conflict
Social Sciences, 2019
This research project uses econometric methods and comparative, cross-national data to see whether violations of human rights increase the likelihood of the onset or escalation of violent protest, terrorism and/or civil war. The findings show that these types of violent internal conflict will occur and escalate if governments: (1) torture, politically imprison, kill, or "disappear" people, (2) do not allow women to participate fully in the political system, including allowing them to hold high level national political office, and (3) do not allow women to participate fully in the economic life of the nation by ensuring equal pay for equal work, by encouraging their entry to the highest paid occupations, and by protecting them from sexual harassment at their workplaces. These types of violations of human rights and the existence of large horizontal inequalities in societies independently produce an increased risk of the onset and escalation of many forms of violent internal conflict. The results also provide some evidence for the argument that there is a trade-off between liberty and security.
A global risk assessment model for civil wars
2009
In this study, we construct a multivariate model that assesses the risk of an outbreak of civil war in a country over a period of 5 years into the future. In addition to structural factors of state weakness, which have dominated the literature on civil war onset, this model includes repression of basic human rights to personal integrity–an important harbinger of wars to come–as an aspect of state behavior.
Do Human Rights Violations Cause Internal Conflict?
Human Rights Quarterly, 2007
This article outlines a human rights framework for analyzing violent internal conflict, "translating" social-scientific findings on conflict risk factors into human rights language. It is argued that discrimination and violations of social and economic rights function as underlying causes of conflict, creating the deep grievances and group identities that may, under some circumstances, motivate collective violence. Violations of civil and political rights, by contrast, are more clearly identifiable as direct conflict triggers. Abuse of personal integrity rights is associated with escalation, and intermediately repressive regimes appear to be most at risk. Denial of political participation rights is associated with internal conflict because full democracies experience less conflict. Yet democratization itself is dangerous, since regime transition is also a major conflict risk factor.
An Empirical Analysis of the Association Between Types of Interventions and Civil War Onset
2015
Quantitative studies have focused on economics, social structures, and lack of political freedoms as being elemental factors for civil war onset. However, these studies have neglected the possibility of a civil war being an unintended consequence of international military intervention. I conduct an empirical analysis of the association between military intervention and civil war onset by collecting data for twenty countries within the Middle East/North African regions from 1980 to 2000. Using the International Military Intervention data set, I categorized "international intervention" into nine different types, all of which were regressed with intrastate war data derived from the Correlates of War project. Two logit regression analyses were used to obtain the results, one of which analyzes civil war at time t and the independent variables at t-1. Additionally, marginal effects were computed to reflect accurate estimates. Overall, the data revealed that certain types of interventions are conducive to civil war onset, such as those pursuing terrorists or rebel groups across the border, gaining or retaining territory, and humanitarian interventions. Other types of interventions, such as those for social protection purposes, taking sides in a domestic dispute, and for the purpose of affecting policies of the target country, has a negative association with civil war onset. Two case studies, the 1953 U.S. intervention into Iran and the 1979 Soviet Union intervention into Afghanistan, reflects the observed findings of the two regression models. The occurrences of international military interventions and civil wars have increased iv dramatically since the end of World War II; therefore, it is important to have a better understanding of the association between the two events. To my knowledge, this is the first study that has categorized different types of interventions under which results indicate that the purpose of a military intervention does effect the likelihood of civil war onset. Scholars may develop this study further with the goal of establishing a better understanding of both phenomena so that we can find more efficient ways of preventing them. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Mirilovic for his patience and guidance throughout the writing process. His encouragement and kind advice have been most helpful in the organization of this thesis. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Lanier, who has aided me immensely with the methodology portion of this thesis. Assembling a panel data set is complex; thus, I am most appreciative to Dr. Lanier for assisting me with ideas on how to accomplish this ambitious datacollecting and data analysis project. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Sadri for being a member on my committee. His expertise on the Middle East / North African regions are most respected and I am grateful that he took the time to sit on my committee. vi
Research on the relationship between civil conflict and repression has led to one conclusion—the law-like finding that states respond to internal challengers with repression—and one puzzle with competing hypotheses—whether state repression escalates civil conflict or not. Studies of repression's effect on conflict have been limited to case studies and subnational designs, which limits the external validity of the arguments. Studies of conflict's effect on repression have treated conflict as a control variable without taking into account the inherent endogeneity between internal conflict and state repression. This article contributes by providing a general, cross-national study of repression's effect on conflict, and vice versa, for external validity. Results of simultaneous equation models demonstrate that both directions of the relationship between state repression and conflict are positive and significant—suggesting a cyclical relationship—while single equation models with a lag structure establish that the effect of repression on conflict is greater than the reverse.
2007
Does the presence of a pro-government militia worsen the human rights of a country even after controlling for other factors? In a statistical analysis of a cross-sectional data set, the authors find evidence that this is indeed the case. Previous research in human rights suggests the importance of accountability in understanding the decision to violate human rights. On the one hand, when faced with armed threats and civil war, governments are more likely to engage in violations. On the other hand, when governments face being held accountable for their actions by withdrawal of public support or international trade and investment, they are more likely to exercise restraint. Democracy and international trade tend to reduce the likelihood of violations. The authors further develop the accountability logic and examine the alternative choice of evading accountability. The empirical results suggest that where governments have an opportunity of evading accountability levels of human rights violations will increase, even after controlling for the factors found influential in earlier research.
Consequences of Civil Conflict
This paper reviews the literature on the development consequences of internal armed conflict and state fragility and analyzes the relationship using data from World Development Indicators, UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Data, and World Bank state fragility assessments. Our main focus is on a set of development indicators that capture seven of the Millenium Development Goals, but we also look briefly into the effect of conflict and fragility on growth, human rights abuses, and democratization. We analyze these relationships using a variety of methods -averages by conflict and fragility status; cross-sectional regression analyses of change in each indicator over the time frame for which we have data; fixed-effects regression analyses of the impact on each indicator for each five-year period 1965-2009; as well as occasional panel time series models and matching techniques.