Human rights and conflict

Prevention Project: Peacebuilding Workstream Roundtable

Macartan Humphreys (WZB, HU, TCD)

Big picture

  • There are many logics underpinning the idea that weak protection of human rights exacerbate conflict risks
  • The cross national correlations are very strong
  • There is reasonably good evidence for a key mechanism: violence causes grievances

But:

  • There is little very strong “causal” evidence
  • There are plausible confounding logics
  • There are plausible counter logics

Big picture

The cross national picture

Classic approach is with some form of “cross national regression”:

“is it the case that places with worse human rights records are more likely to have subsequent civil conflicts?”

Studies include Fearon (2012) (WDR), Skarstad and Strand (2016) and Rost (2011)

Let’s have a look

Data

…has gotten better and easier to access

Rights and conflict

Basic relations are very strong

Political terror scale for countries with and without onsets

Risks

Basic relations are very strong

Model based results generally strong

Difference in probabilities of civil war onset in a Fearon-Laitin style model for each unit shift in the 5 point Political Terror Scale

Model based results generally strong

Difference in probabilities of civil war onset in a Fearon-Laitin style model for each unit shift in the 100 point CIRI human rights data scale.

Fixed effects approach

Are we just picking up stable features of at-risk countries?

  • Fixed effects (with time controls this is basic “differences in differences”) removes all time invariant aspects of countries to focus on the changes in rights

  • Requires an assumption that risks would otherwise have evolved similarly in countries with abuses as they do in countries without abuses, had they not had abuses.

Given this assumption, evidence remains fairly strong.

Fixed effects approach

Fixed effects estimate with PTS score

Fixed effects approach

Fixed effects estimate with CIRI score

Logics

Logics: Causal pathways

Multiple accounts hard to tell apart. Plausibly all true to some extent.

A simple story

Logics: Causal pathways

Many other “mediators” imaginable:

  • information gains: learning about government intent, values (coalitional dynamics)
  • information losses: bargaining failures
  • hardened identities: in-group identification, legitimacy, outgroup-homogeneity, dehumanization, bargaining failures
  • loss of trust: bargaining failures

Mechanistic evidence

Logics: Threats

But maybe…

Logics: Threats

  • Almost any third thing that could cause conflict could produce human right violations also
  • Tautology: Rights abuses are conflict events
  • Mythmaking and rationalization after the fact

In addition: poorly understood effect heterogeneity. Abuses are sometimes deployed to prevent conflict. What we see is likely a mixture of effective and ineffective uses of the strategy.

Looking forward

  • Research: Looks like an area where deeper analysis could add value: e.g exploiting natural experiments such as ICC indictments to instrument for HR (Geoff?)

  • Current take away: But given limitations most evidence appears strong and going, for the most part, in one direction

  • Puzzle: A puzzle to address to inform action: if in fact rights violations are counterproductive, why are they used? Are we conditioning on desperation, and will PBC mechanisms work under these conditions?

Extra slides

Conflict prevalence

largely decreased

Prevalence of (civil) conflicts

(Civil) conflict onset

Though more onsets

New (civil) conflicts

New cases

New cases

References

Fearon, James D. 2012. Governance and Civil War Onset. World Bank.
Jahnke, Sara, Katharina Abad Borger, and Andreas Beelmann. 2022. “Predictors of Political Violence Outcomes Among Young People: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Political Psychology 43 (1): 111–29.
Kocher, Matthew Adam, Thomas B Pepinsky, and Stathis N Kalyvas. 2011. “Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War.” American Journal of Political Science 55 (2): 201–18.
Lyall, Jason. 2009. “Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks? Evidence from Chechnya.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53 (3): 331–62.
Nasie, Meytal, Michal Reifen Tagar, and Daniel Bar-Tal. 2021. “Ethno-Political Socialization of Young Children in Societies Involved in Intractable Conflict: The Case of Israel.” Journal of Social Issues 77 (4): 1257–81.
Rost, Nicolas. 2011. “Human Rights Violations, Weak States, and Civil War.” Human Rights Review 12: 417–40.
Skarstad, Kjersti, and Håvard Strand. 2016. “Do Human Rights Violations Increase the Risk of Civil War?” International Area Studies Review 19 (2): 107–30.
Taylor, Laura K, and Shelley McKeown. 2019. “Does Violence Beget Violence? The Role of Family Ethnic Socialization and Intergroup Bias Among Youth in a Setting of Protracted Intergroup Conflict.” International Journal of Behavioral Development 43 (5): 403–8.