The Unintended Consequences of Human Rights Advocacy on State Repression∗ Jacqueline H.R. DeMeritt† University of North Texas
Courtenay R. Conrad‡ University of California, Merced
Christopher J. Fariss§ Pennsylvania State University
May 24, 2014
∗
Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2011 and 2014 Annual Meetings of the International Studies Association, the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, and the Department of Political Science at Binghamton University. Thanks to Sabine Carey, Christian Davenport, Kristine Eck, Ryan Jablonski, Matthew Krain, and Keith Schnakenberg for helpful comments and suggestions and to Christine Balarezo, Taylor Lee, Steve Liebel, Omar Salem, and Delina Wright for invaluable research assistance. Word Count (inclusive): 10,647 † Assistant Professor of Political Science. Email:
[email protected] ‡ Assistant Professor of Political Science. Email:
[email protected] § Assistant Professor of Political Science. Email:
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Abstract
Leaders have a variety of repressive techniques at their disposal. As a result, studies focusing on one repressive tactic in isolation—for example, political imprisonment or state-sponsored killing—may lead to biased conclusions about the conditions under which we expect broad improvements in human rights. In this paper, we develop a theory of the impact of international advocacy campaigns on the government’s choice of repressive tactics. We argue that these campaigns— because they often target one type of repressive behavior—increase the costs of some, but not all, repressive methods. When an international spotlight increases the relative costs of a repressive tactic, governments may decrease the use of that tactic while increasing other rights violations. Using new data on the type of violation shamed by United Nations Humans Rights Commission and Council from 1995 to 2010 and a new empirical strategy to account for correlated errors across repressive tactics, we show that shaming one physical integrity rights violation leads to increases in other types of repression. These tactical adjustments are strategic, designed to minimize the rising costs of the targeted form of abuse.
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Introduction
State leaders have a wide variety of repressive techniques at their disposal. Although many states repress as a matter of course (Poe and Tate, 1994b; Cingranelli and Richards, 1999a), their methods of abuse vary. In the arena of personal integrity violations,1 governments can imprison their political opposition (e.g., Seymour, 1979), torture them once they are are under state control (e.g., Rejali, 2007; Evans and Morgan, 1998), “disappear” them (e.g., Grossman, 1991) or kill them extrajudicially (e.g., Krain, 1997; Harff, 2003; Midlarsky, 2005).2 For example, in the closing months of 2010, as Myanmar prepared for its first national elections in 20 years, ethnic minority activists were arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned (AI, 2010). In Mexico, political imprisonment is not the norm: Since 2007, human rights defenders have instead been killed by their government (AI, 2009, 2010). And in Uzbekistan in 2010, persons suspected of involvement with banned parties and their relatives were swept up en mass and tortured by state security forces (AI, 2010). Methods of repression also vary within states over time. Since the start of 2010, violence from the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region has spread throughout the country. More than 2,500 civilians have been killed by the government; thousands more have been disappeared— picked up in the dark of night and transported to locations unknown. Some of those disappeared remain missing; others resurface bearing the scars of torture (AI, 2009, 2010). Even outside the pressures of war, most states violate human rights. Between 2001 and 2003, for example, Rwanda held its first series of post-genocide elections. Although personal integrity violations decreased once internal conflict ended, democracy has not ended repression. Instead, Rwanda’s transition to democracy has “revealed a shift in repressive practices” 1
Following Davenport (2007b, 476), we define personal integrity violations as “state or state-affiliated activities which target the integrity of the person (i.e., which directly threaten human life)”. We discuss the choice to focus on personal integrity violations below, and use the terms personal integrity violations and physical integrity violations interchangeably. 2 In the worst cases of civil and international war, states engage in a brutal combination of these tactics (e.g., Rasler, 1986; Poe, Tate and Keith, 1999b; Cingranelli and Richards, 1999a; Wood and Gibney, 2010).
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(Davenport, 2007a, 2-3). More specifically, the emergence of the democratic regime was coupled with heightened restrictions on the press and increased imprisonment of the opposition. Why do states repress differently? When governments face increasing costs associated with one tactic, do they simultaneously increase other violations? In this paper, we investigate (1) why states differ in their choice of repressive tactics, and (2) how individual states trade-off between repressive tactics. To do so, we focus on the effect of international advocacy campaigns on repressive tactics. These campaigns, also called “naming and shaming” in the literature, are designed to shine a spotlight on rights abuse. Although the goal of negative publicity is to persuade repressive regimes to respect human rights norms and abide by their international commitments (e.g., Finnemore, 1993; Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink, 1999; Wong, 2012), evidence that naming and shaming campaigns “work” (i.e., decrease repression) is mixed (e.g., Hafner-Burton, 2008; Davis and Murdie, 2008; Franklin, 2008). We argue that these mixed results occur either because extant literature assumes that international advocacy has identical impacts on each form of physical integrity abuse (e.g., Poe and Tate, 1994b; Poe, Tate and Keith, 1999b; Franklin, 2008; Hafner-Burton, 2008) or that advocacy campaigns affect respect for one right without impacting others (e.g., Davenport, 1995, 1999; Conrad and Moore, 2010; Vreeland, 2008; Powell and Staton, 2009; Hathaway, 2002). Instead of focusing on repression writ large or targeting our analysis on one repressive tactic in isolation, we argue that the set of physical integrity rights are a set of related and substitutable policies. Building on Risse, Ropp and Sikkink (1999, 2013), we develop a theory of the impact of international advocacy campaigns on the government’s repressive tactics. We argue that these campaigns—because they are often targeted at one type of behavior—increase the costs of some, but not all, repressive methods. Thus we expect leaders to respond to naming and shaming for one type of abuse by granting a specific tactical concession, decreasing that abuse while introducing or ramping up other tactics. Following the exposition of our theory, 2
we introduce new time-series, cross-national data on types of violation shamed by the United Nations Humans Rights Commission (UNCHR) and Council (UNHRC) from 1995 to 2010. Our results show that the naming and shaming of one physical integrity rights violation in isolation can have pernicious effects, increasing the government’s use of other repressive tactics. This study adds to our understanding of repression by suggesting the conditions under which governments substitute one tactic for another and provides a novel explanation for why previous research on naming and shaming has failed to find systematic evidence that international advocacy campaigns reduce human rights violations.
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Assumptions & the Study of State Repression
Although it is often treated as homogenous, state “repression” is a multifaceted concept (Earl, 2011). Empirical studies have attempted to reduce the complexity of the concept through the use of indexes and scales (e.g., Cingranelli and Richards, 1999b; Wood and Gibney, 2010) and focus on “state repression” as a single concept of interest. Those studies support three claims. First, political leaders repress in response to domestic threats (e.g., Gurr, 1988; Davenport, 1995; Gartner and Regan, 1996; Moore, 2000; Shellman, 2006a; Ritter, 2010). Second, democracies repress less often and less severely than their autocratic counterparts (e.g., Poe and Tate, 1994b; Davenport, 1995, 1999; Poe, Tate and Keith, 1999b; Davenport and Armstrong, 2004; Davenport, 2007a). Third, the economy matters—higher government income and incoming international monetary fund (IMF) loans decrease repression, while natural resource wealth and World Bank structural adjustment agreements increase abuse (e.g., Franklin, 1997; Abdouharb and Cingranelli, 2006; Abouharb and Cingranelli, 2007; Young, 2009; DeMeritt and Young, 2011). As a result of this work, we better understand the contexts under which states repress their citizens. Although valuable, extant work on state repression it is limited by its reliance on two
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assumptions: Scholars either (1) assume that a given independent variable exerts identical influences on each physical integrity right (e.g., Poe and Tate, 1994b; Poe, Tate and Keith, 1999b), or (2) assume that the processes by which a given right is violated are independent of the processes by which other rights are violated (e.g., Davenport, 1995, 1999; Conrad and Moore, 2010; Vreeland, 2008; Powell and Staton, 2009; Hathaway, 2002). Because of the first body of work—which investigates influences on repression as a single dependent variable— we are better informed about why states violate the set of physical integrity rights. As a result of the second—which investigates influences on particular human rights violations independent of the others—we know something about why states violate individual physical integrity rights. But one important consequence of the assumptions underlying this work is that we do not know whether (and why) state leaders substitute one repressive method for the others. Because scholars have treated repression as a single outcome—or focused on an individual tactic in isolation—rather treating repression as a set of related behaviors, questions about why states repress differently have gone unasked and remain unanswered.3 In what follows, we contribute to the literature on state repression in two ways. First, we relax these assumptions and investigate the use of different repressive methods in a comparative way. Second, we consider the impacts of one factor—international advocacy campaigns or naming and shaming—on state repression tactic substitution within this new disaggregated context.
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The Repressive Toolkit
Governments have an arsenal of repressive tools at their disposal. In this paper, we focus exclusively on one set of repressive tactics: personal integrity violations. Following Davenport (2007b, 476), we define personal integrity violations as “state or state-affiliated activities 3
Although see the exploratory analysis of the co-occurance patterns of human rights practices by Fariss and Schnakenberg (2013).
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(that) target the integrity of the person (i.e., which directly threaten human life).” These rights can be contrasted with civil liberties restrictions, which involve “state or state-affiliated limitations, such as arrests, banning, and curfews, being placed on expression, association, assembly, and beliefs.” We focus on personal integrity violations for two reasons. First, violations of personal integrity rights “offend the most widely-shared norms of appropriate government conduct” (Walsh and Piazza, 2010, 552). Second, we consider physical security to be fundamental in securing civil rights; without freedom from personal integrity violations, citizens are unlikely to mobilize in favor of political and civil rights. It is difficult to demand the right to vote, for example, before the right to live is secured. The literature distinguishes between four key types of personal integrity violations: extrajudicial killings, political imprisonment, torture, and political disappearances. We follow Cingranelli and Richards (2004) in our definitions of these concepts.4 They define extrajudicial killings as “killings by government officials without due process of law.” This definition includes killings by private groups acting as agents of the state and does not include persons sentenced to the death penalty by a court of law. Political imprisonment occurs when individuals are incarcerated by government officials as a consequence of “their speech; their non-violent religions practices including proselytizing; or their membership in a group, including an ethnic or racial group.” Imprisonment for criminal behavior is not included. Torture refers to the “purposeful inflicting of extreme pain, whether mental or physical, by government officials or by private individuals at the instigation of government officials.” Finally, we define political disappearances as “cases in which people have disappeared, political motivation appears likely, and the victims have not been found.” Having identified repression as the preferred means by which to pursue their political ambitions, how do state leaders decide which method to employ? For simplicity in the development of our argument, we make two relatively innocuous assumptions. First, we 4
These definitions are consistent with those used in the literatures focusing on each violation.
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assume that the benefit of repression—quiescence—is constant across methods of abuse, but that the costs of different tactics may vary.5 Second, we assume that states choose the least costly method of repression that helps them reach their goals. Just as states weigh the costs and benefits of repression against other policy alternatives, we argue that they weigh the costs and benefits of physical integrity violation tactics when deciding whether to kill, imprison, torture, or disappear their opposition. To understand how states choose from the set of types of repression and substitute across repressive policies, then, we need to understand how the costs of repression vary across tactics. A full discussion of the costs of each type of personal integrity abuse is outside the purview and space constraints of the current paper. Instead, we focus on how international advocacy or naming and shaming campaigns affect the government’s preferred manner of repression and the conditions under which governments substitute one repressive tactic for another.
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The Effect of International Advocacy
In an increasingly globalized world replete with international organizations (IOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and twenty-four hour news media, human rights abuses are difficult (if not impossible) to hide. Because there are few international mechanisms to address violations of international human rights law (Neumayer, 2005), however, some actors attempt to hold repressive states accountable by publicizing human rights violations to the international community. These actors—including sovereign governments, the United Nations (UN), international and domestic advocacy groups, and the global news media— engage in naming and shaming campaigns with the hope that such negative publicity brings repressive regimes into compliance with human rights norms and international and domestic 5
We make this simplifying assumption so that we can isolate, develop and test expectations about varying costs of different repressive methods. Future work should focus on unpacking variance in the benefits of repressive tactics.
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law intended to limit violations. Following Risse, Ropp and Sikkink (1999, 2013), we assume that the costs of repression vary on an international dimension.6 Specifically, we assume that being targeted with an international naming and shaming campaign increases leaders’ costs for continuing the status quo with regard to repression. Empirical research supports this claim. For example, there is evidence that states with repressive human rights records receive less foreign direct investment (FDI) and portfolio investment (Richards, Gelleny and Sacko, 2001; Blanton and Blanton, 2007), as well as fewer arms exports (Blanton, 2000), than their rights-respecting counterparts. States are also increasingly tying trade decisions to human rights, creating preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with countries that respect human rights (Hafner-Burton, 2005). Finally, negative attention at the international level can result in the creation of new domestic NGOs and an increased presence of litigants taking claims before a domestic court (Conrad and Ritter, 2013). In short, negative attention at the international level can lead to costly domestic and international consequences. Existing work argues that such improvement occurs through socialization: principled ideas become standards of appropriate behavior that lead to changes in identities, interests, and behavior (e.g., Ikenberry and Kupchan, 1990; Finnemore, 1993; Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998; Keck and Sikkink, 1998). In their spiral model of human rights change, Risse, Ropp and Sikkink (1999, 2013) identify three processes that together socialize human rights abusers through five distinct phases. The model explains how abusers commitment to respect human rights occurs first through instrumental action. This is followed by fundamental changes that result in sustained compliance. Because we are interested in the short-term effects of international advocacy on respect for human rights rather than on long-term compliance with human rights norms, we focus on the first three phases of this process (repression, denial, 6 To draw inferences about international costs of repression, we account for domestic costs in our empirical models.
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and tactical concession). Consider this stylized version: A state represses, and international actors accuse it of violating human rights norms (i.e., naming and shaming occurs). The repressive regime denies the accusations, contesting the validity of the norms. As shaming continues, the regime begins to grant tactical concessions (e.g., releasing political prisoners or signing international agreements). These concessions are instrumental, made to alleviate pressure from and tangible costs imposed by the international community and domestic opposition (Risse, Ropp and Sikkink, 2013, 5-6). Despite theoretical expectations and evidence that advocacy campaigns impose costs and can lead to tactical concessions, empirical evidence on the direct effectiveness of these campaigns is inconsistent: Hafner-Burton (2008) finds that efforts to name and shame states for restricting political freedoms loosen such restrictions, while similar efforts to publicize physical integrity violations have no pacific impact on that terror. Further, states shamed by international actors may actually increase their use of terror after being targeted (HafnerBurton, 2008). Franklin (2008) finds that naming and shaming lessens physical integrity abuse, but only in states with high foreign capital dependence. In short, empirical results are mixed: naming and shaming campaigns may improve respect for human rights, but only for some rights and only under specific conditions. We argue that these mixed results follow from two assumptions, introduced above, that are implicit in existing empirical work. The literature either assumes that international naming and shaming has identical impacts on each form of physical integrity abuse (e.g., Poe and Tate, 1994b; Poe, Tate and Keith, 1999b; Franklin, 2008; Hafner-Burton, 2008), or it assumes that advocacy campaigns affect respect for one right (e.g., torture) without impacting others (e.g., Davenport, 1995, 1999; Conrad and Moore, 2010; Vreeland, 2008; Powell and Staton, 2009; Hathaway, 2002). These assumptions strike us as consequentially restrictive. It seems particularly implausible that a leader, having identified repression as a cost-effective means of pursuing a desired outcome, will cease all repression in the face of 8
an international advocacy campaign. Instead, we suggest that the set of physical integrity rights may be a set of related and substitutable policies, and that improvements in specific type(s) of abuse can be tactical concessions made in response to international advocacy. If we are correct, then the confused status quo makes sense: Conflating different types of abuse into a single dependent variable, or focusing on one type of abuse without considering alternative options, will not capture the process by which governments decide whether and how to repress, and therefore will not yield consistent results. If concessions are instrumental rather than principled, we would expect leaders to make them without sacrificing the ability to repress in pursuit of policy goals (e.g., quiescence). If an advocacy campaign publicizes a state’s use of torture, for example, we would expect that campaign to impact the state’s subsequent use of torture but may not expect it to simultaneously lessen its use of imprisonment, disappearance, or killing. Further, if HafnerBurton (2008) is correct, then states respond to shame by decreasing some types of abuse while increasing others. These tactical increases may also be instrumental. Some forms of abuse can obfuscate evidence of other forms. For example, disappearing individuals after they have been tortured can make it more difficult to prove that the torture occurred. This reduces the costs of being shamed for torture, and allows the state to continue repressing with impunity. Theoretically, states grant tactical concessions in one area while maintaining the overall amount of repression being used, and making it more difficult to demonstrate that the shamed abuse has occurred. In this case, we would expect the same campaign to have a negative impact on one form of abuse and a positive impact on others. Conflating these types of abuse into a single dependent variable prevents seeing these countervailing impacts empirically; instead, shame’s pacific impact on one form of abuse and simultaneous aggravation of a second may cancel each other out, leading to the null finding we see in extant work on state repression. Above, we assumed that being the target of an international advocacy campaign in9
creases leaders’ costs for continuing the status quo. Relaxing the literature’s implicit assumptions and focusing on types of personal integrity abuse as distinct and related outcomes, we submit that the status quo may be more fine-grained than “repression” as a unidimensional concept. Instead, we argue that international attention for one form of human rights abuse increases leaders’ costs for continuing that type of abuse, but does not affect the costs for other forms of repression. This, then, is the insight driving the current study: Tactical concessions are unlikely to be uniform across repressive methods. Rather than expect leaders to respond to negative publicity by eliminating repression completely, we expect such publicity to lead to substitution in repressive tactics away from the relatively more costly tactic and toward relatively cheap violations, while also hiding or minimizing evidence of the shamed form of abuse.7 For example, if Amnesty International or the United Nations names and shames a country for its practices of brutal killing, it is unlikely that the state will suddenly stop repressing altogether. What is more likely is that the state will decrease its levels of killing in response to the advocacy campaign, but simultaneously increase its level of other human rights violations—like political imprisonment. As a state is increasingly in the spotlight for using one type of repression, then, it is increasingly likely to shift tactics—easing up on the strategy that brought international trouble while increasing its efforts to repress in other ways. From this discussion we offer our set of hypotheses about the conditions under which states substitute one repressive tactic for another in response to international advocacy 7 The idea that actors switch or substitute tactics is not new. Lichbach (1987) explains how dissidents, seeking policy change from a government, respond to repression by that government. He argues that dissidents whose violent tactics are repressed will switch to nonviolence, and vice versa. Empirical evidence supports that expectation (Francisco, 1996; Moore, 1998). In short, “an opposition group shifts its tactics in response to government’s coercive policy” (Lichbach, 1987, 268). Like Lichbach, we are interested in how actors choose among available policies in the pursuit of a single goal: we argue that leaders can select from a myriad of repressive techniques to quell their political opposition. By focusing on the costs and benefits of repression, we develop a theory about the conditions under which leaders choose techniques and/or substitute one repressive policy for another. Our work thus differs from Lichbach’s in two important ways. First, we are interested in explaining the choice among repressive tactics rather than responses to repression. Second, we investigate the influence of international actors rather than those who are repressing or being repressed.
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campaigns: Hypothesis 1. In response to international advocacy condemning one repressive tactic, states decrease the use of that repressive tactic. Hypothesis 2. In response to international advocacy condemning one repressive tactic, states increase the use of other repressive tactics.
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Data and Methods
In order to test our hypotheses about international influences on human rights substitutability, we need to know the specific human rights violation(s) for which a country was shamed. Although cross-national data exist on when states are named and shamed by the international community (Ron, Ramos and Rodgers, 2005; Ramos, Ron and Thoms, 2007; Lebovic and Voeten, 2006; Hafner-Burton, 2008; Franklin, 2008), we are unaware of any quantitative data recording why states were shamed by international actors. Instead, existing data only record the number of times a given country was shamed for repressing in a given year, regardless of why the country was shamed. In order to test our hypotheses, we collected new data on the type of human rights violation shamed in resolutions issued by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) and the United Nation Human Rights Council (UNHRC) from 1995 to 2011. In what follows, we describe these UN bodies and our data collection efforts before discussing the empirical strategy for testing our hypotheses about the conditions under which states engage in repressive policy substitution.
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New Data on International Advocacy Campaigns
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) and the Human Rights Council (UNHCR) were established by provisions contained in the United Nations Charter and
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were charged with safeguarding and promoting human rights around the world. They hold broad human rights mandates, address an unlimited audience, and take action based on majority voting (UN, N.d.). The original Charter-based bodies included the UNCHR and its subsidiary Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. These were replaced in 2006 by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and its subsidiaries, including the Universal Period Review Working Group and the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee.8 From its creation in 1947 until 1967, the CHR focused on promoting human rights rather than on investigating or condemning abuse. In 1967, the Commission began to investigate and produce reports on human rights violations. In the 1970s and 1980s the ability to form workgroups was introduced: In the 1970s, it became possible to create workgroups focusing on abuse in specific geographic regions, and in the 1980s, it became possible to create workgroups to specialize in specific types of abuse (e.g., Meron, 1986; Weissbrodt, 1986; Reisman, 1990). Thus the current norms and practices of the UN’s Charter-based human rights bodies developed over their first thirty years and became reminiscent of today’s institutions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The CHR and HRC have three main tools by which to spotlight specific countries for repression. First, they can investigate alleged abuse via confidential consideration. Second, they can provide advisory services for a state accused of human rights abuse. Finally, they can, via plurality vote, adopt resolutions publicly condemning a country for its human rights record. Following Lebovic and Voeten (2006, 864-5), we assume the following with respect to the relative severity of each option: (a) discontinuing discussion or having a sanctioning resolution fail is the most favorable desired outcome for the alleged abusive state; (b) a public airing of grievances is more shameful and costly (politically damaging) to the alleged offender than a private discussion; and (c) a public vote of condemnation is the least desired 8 For a longer discussion of the evolution of the Charter-based human rights bodies, see Lebovic and Voeten (2006, 865-8).
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outcome from the alleged offender’s standpoint. From this discussion and these assumptions it follows that confidential consideration and advisory opinions are “typically used to avoid harsh public criticism of an offender,” while public resolutions are explicitly intended to criticize harshly (Lebovic and Voeten, 2006, 864). Our interest is in the impacts of practices that raise the costs of continuing repressive policies; since public resolutions are the form of shaming most explicitly designed to accomplish this end, we focus here exclusively on arguably the harshest type of naming and shaming. The unit of analysis in our new data is an individual naming and shaming event (i.e., a UNCHR or UNHRC resolution). Following Cingranelli and Richards (1999a), we distinguish between two categories of violations for which states can be named and shamed—physical integrity and empowerment rights violations. For each resolution, we record basic information: The date of the resolution, its identification number and title, and the name of the country being shamed. We code which category is being shamed and the specific form(s) of abuse that are mentioned. Within the set of physical integrity violations, we record allegations of extralegal killing, political imprisonment, disappearances, and torture. Within the set of empowerment rights,9 we record restrictions on freedoms of speech, movement, political participation (electoral self-determination), religion, and workers’ rights. In addition to these categories of rights, we also code shaming for restrictions on women’s rights, and for weapons treaty violations. The key point is that we record not only “who got condemned and by whom” (Lebovic and Voeten, 2006, 862-3), but also why condemnation by the international community occurred in the first place. Before moving to our hypothesis tests, we briefly summarize relevant aspects of these new data. First, Figure 1 presents the frequency of UN shaming over time, including all resolutions as well as those resolutions calling out specific countries for abuse. Both in 9
Note that we record shaming behavior with respect to empowerment rights, although we do not explicitly engage those rights in the current manuscript.
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general and over time, the subset of resolutions naming specific states is significantly smaller than the full set of resolutions. This is because United Nations bodies often issue general resolutions about a particular human rights violation, rather than targeting their ire against a particular state. Further, the number of states named is slightly lower than the number of resolutions naming states because resolutions that call out specific states often name more than one violator at a time. These facts suggest that studying United Nations naming and shaming in general, rather than focusing on those acts that spotlight specific states for specific abuses, may be misleading.10 Figure 1: Shaming by the UNCHR and UNHRC, 1995-2011
UN Human Rights Resolu
