Emily Hencken Ritter

Contagious Rebellion and Preemptive Repression

Civil conflict appears to be contagious—scholars have shown that civil wars in a state’s neighborhood make citizens more likely to rebel at home. However, war occurs when both rebels and the state engage in conflict. How do state authorities respond to the potential for civil conflict to spread? We argue that elites will anticipate the incentive-altering effects of civil wars abroad and increase repression at home to preempt potential rebellion. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model and spatially weighted conflict measures, we find robust evidence that a state will engage in higher levels of human rights violations as civil war becomes more prevalent in its geographic proximity. We thus find evidence that states violate rights as a function of the internal politics of other states. Further, we argue authorities will act not to mimic their neighbors but rather to avoid their fate.

Treaties, Tenure, and Torture: The Conflicting Domestic Effects of International Law

International human rights treaties are argued to increase both the likelihood of domestic mobilized dissent and judicial constraint. These pressures pull leaders in conflicting directions: mobilized challenges undermine a leader’s position in power, increasing incentives to repress; courts raise the probability of litigation, decreasing incentives to repress. We argue authorities balance these pressures based on their job security. Politically insecure leaders, desperate to retain power, repress to control the destabilizing effects of dissent. Secure leaders are less likely to fall to citizen pressures, but the probability of facing an effective judiciary weighs heavily in their expected costs. Consequently, they repress less to avoid litigation. We find empirical support for the implications of our formal theory using data on commitment to the UN Convention Against Torture. Treaties have no effect on repression in states with insecure leaders but have a positive effect on rights protection in states hea...

Policy Disputes, Political Survival, and the Onset and Severity of State Repression

Under what conditions will a state repress its citizens? The literature examining human rights violations lacks consensus over exactly how repression and dissent are interrelated. I argue that contradictions have arisen because scholars have not derived expectations consistent with modeling three common assumptions: (1) dissent and repression are causally interrelated (2) states and groups are in conflict over some policy or good and (3) authorities repress to remain in office. I develop a formal model based on these principles, and I predict that changes in the same independent variable can have divergent effects on the onset and severity of repression. Using coded event data for all states from 1990 to 2004 and a two-tiered estimator, I find that increases in executive job security decrease the likelihood that repression will occur in the first place, but increase the severity of observed violations.

Preventing and Responding to Dissent: The Observational Challenges of Explaining Strategic Repression

Although scholarly consensus suggests that dissent causes repression, the behaviors are endogenous: governments and dissidents act in expectation of each other’s behavior. Empirical studies have not accounted well for this endogeneity. We argue that preventive aspects of repression meaningfully affect the relationship between observed dissent and repression. When governments use preventive repression, the best response to dissent that does occur is unclear; observed dissent does not meaningfully predict responsive repression. By contrast, governments that do not engage in ex ante repression will be more likely to do it ex post. We follow U.S. voting scholarship and propose a new instrument to model the endogeneity: rainfall. We couple rainfall data in African provinces and U.S. states with data on dissent and repression and find that dissent fails to have a significant effect on responsive repression in states that engage in preventive repression.

Bargaining and the effectiveness of international criminal regimes

International institutions lack the independent ability to punish non-compliance, but states sustain cooperation because they can target one another for punishment. In contrast, international criminal courts and tribunals (ICTs) can enforce rulings once suspects are in custody, but they lack the independent power of capture, leaving them unable to punish alleged criminals and therefore deter crime. We analyze a game between an ICT and a suspect to assess the potential of pre-arrest bargaining as a solution to the problem of capture. We show that ICTs that bargain with fugitives will be able to secure their surrender and administer justice, although this comes at the cost of incentivizing some crime. Further, those courts least able to secure their suspects’ capture will, surprisingly, be the most willing to issue warrants. International institutions may thus be able to achieve compliance even when faced with uncooperative member states.

Emigrants and the onset of civil war

We propose that emigrants affect the likelihood of civil war onset in their state of origin by influencing the willingness of individuals to join rebel movements and the probability that the state and rebels will be unable to reach a mutually acceptable bargain to avoid conflict in three ways. First, migrants communicating with actors at home facilitate valid comparisons between the effects of policies in the home state as compared to policies in the host state enacted on a similar group, creating new motivation to join collective challenges against the state. Second, migrants send remittances, providing resources that can be used in collective challenges that are particularly difficult for states to anticipate, making the outbreak of conflict more likely. Finally, migrants publicize information about conditions in their home state while living in the host state, reducing home government uncertainty such that conflict is less likely to occur. We test these hypotheses on an international dataset and find support for each of our predicted mechanisms.