State Repression and Human Rights II

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together a group of scholars working at the frontier of repression scholarship and pushing forward on two important aspects of repression studies: identifying mechanisms facilitating repression and improving the measurement of violence. In doing so, the four projects provide dynamic and more fine-grained insights into the scholarship of repression and conflict processes.

The first project examines causal mechanisms connecting sanctions and state human rights violations by showing that threatened sanctions will bring about greater state repression by raising the probability of anti-government protests. The second project investigates the role of pro-government militias in deploying repression by analyzing the types of militia groups are likely to become a greater threat to the human rights violation. The third project deals with the difficulty of assessing the accountability for core international crimes and proposes a strategy for estimating a normalized measure of latent core crimes accountability in various conflict countries using a dynamic latent variable model. The final project addresses the challenge of systemically coding human rights violation in the age of big data by proposing an automated coding process that produces categorical information about physical integrity rights violations described in annual human rights reports.

Together, the four projects present new theoretical understanding of the mechanisms constraining or facilitating repression. Empirically, they offer new data, research design, and measurement strategies to analyze and predict the threats of human right violations.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Revisiting the Causal Links between Sanctions and Human Rights Violations - Ryan Yu-Lin Liou, University of Georgia; Amanda Murdie, University of Georgia

• Classifying Physical Integrity Rights Allegations using Machine Learning - Rebecca Elizabeth Cordell, University of Texas at Dallas; K. Chad Clay, University of Georgia; Christopher J. Fariss, University of Michigan; Reed M. Wood, Arizona State University

• How Media Freedom affects the Escalation of State Violence - Sabine C. Carey, University of Mannheim; Belen Gonzalez, University of Mannheim; Neil J. Mitchell, University College London

• Variations in the Motivations of Law Enforcement: Arrest and >> Torture Beyond the War on Drugs - Daniela Tatiana Barba-Sanchez, Princeton University

Chair

• Sabine C. Carey University of Mannheim

Discussants

• Christopher M. Sullivan Louisiana State University

• Howard Liu Duke University