State Repression and Human Rights I

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together a group of scholars who study state repression and human rights from the perspective of international relations and comparative politics. The intellectual interchange between these two perspectives will improve our understanding of how repression works and how policy intervention could curb the abuse of state power. Findings proposed in the panel provide dynamic and fine-grained insights into the scholarship of repression and conflict processes.

The first project assesses whether judicial decisions contain excessive violence by state agents in the context of the US, where police officers' usage of electronic control devices (ECD) was unevenly constrained by decisions of the Courts of Appeals. The second research explores how the intersection between partisanship and exposure to violence affects citizens’ trust in coercive state institutions like police and army in post-conflict societies. The third project exploits a close-election regression discontinuity design to investigate the effect of legislative incumbency on electoral repression. The authors emphasize that the effect of incumbency on electoral violence depends on various institutional contexts such as electoral systems. The fourth research studies whether shaming of state repression by NGOs can improve a country’s condition of human rights. The authors stress that shaming should be treated as dyadic interactions when assessing its impact on human rights violations.

Together, these four projects facilitate scholars’ understanding of the political logic of repression at both the country level and subnational level, offering a more comprehensive landscape of repression studies. The contexts studied cover not only conflict-prone developing countries but also advanced democracies, exploring the generality of findings. The findings also yield important policy implications to curb excessive use of state violence.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Chair

• Howard Liu University of South Carolina

Discussants

• Pearce Edwards Carnegie Mellon University

• Christopher M. Sullivan Louisiana State University

Individual Presentations

• Judicial Decisions and the Excessive Use of Force - Courtenay R. Conrad, University of California, Merced; Kristine Eck, Uppsala University; Sophia Hatz, Department of Peace and Conflict Research

• How Partisanship and Insecurity Shapes Trust in Coercive Security Institutions - Travis B. Curtice, Drexel University

• Tailoring the Message: The Dyadic Nature of NGO Shaming - Robert Thuan Brathwaite, Michigan State University; Shanshan Lian; Amanda Murdie, University of Georgia; Baekkwan Park

• Legislative Incumbency and Electoral Repression and Violence - Lauren E Young, University of California, Davis; Marika Miner, University of California, Davis