K. Chad Clay

Neighborhood Watch: Spatial Effects of Human Rights INGOs

This article examines the neighborhood effects of various activities of human rights international nongovernmental organizations (human rights INGOs or, as used hereafter, HROs). We argue that the presence of HRO members or volunteers “next door” increases the advocacy mobilization and resources of a domestic population, resulting in improvements in human rights performance. When contiguous countries have large numbers of HRO members within their borders, these members are able to mobilize resources that are either directly transmitted across borders or diffuse across state boundaries. Using spatial econometric techniques in a sample of 117 states from 1994 to 2003, we examine the effect of neighboring HRO membership, permanent location presence, and shaming on the probability of improvements in human rights practices. We find that the presence of neighboring HRO members increases the probability of human rights improvements, but that this is conditional on the ability of the groups to freely move across ...

Opening Yourself Up: The Role of External and Internal Transparency in Terrorism Attacks

Information transparency is frequently heralded as a positive regime feature. However, does information transparency produce negative side effects such as increased terrorist activity? We theorize that freer transmission of information creates opportunities for radical dissidents to employ political violence to draw attention to their agendas. We build a theoretical argument connecting external (international) transparency to increases in transnational terrorism, and internal (domestic) transparency to increases in domestic terrorism. We find empirical support for our theory by analyzing the effects of measures of transparency on counts of terrorist attacks in as many as 144 countries for time periods as long as 1970 to 2006.

Respect for Physical-Integrity Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Evaluating Poe and Tate's Model 20 Years Later

Poe and Tates 1994 study is likely the most influential in the quantitative study of human rights, serving as a foundation for a great deal of scholarship. In this article, we briefly consider the impact this article had on academic research on state repression, particularly in relation to democracy. We then empirically revisit Poe and Tates model using a longer timeframe, updated method of estimation, improved measure of state repression, improved measures of some independent variables, and a spatial indicator. We stratify our results by specific physical-integrity right, world region, and time, finding variation in the associates of state repression across types of rights and world regions but stability over time. Finally, like Davenport and Armstrong (2004), we find a threshold where democracys protective effects appear to begin, but this threshold differs across specific types of rights and that democracy may have rights-protective effects at lower levels than expected.

Taking the fight to them: neighborhood human rights organizations and domestic protest

This article examines how human rights international non-governmental organizations (hereafter HROs) can increase the level of political protest in neighboring states. Previous research suggests local activities of HROs help to generate mobilization for protests against governments. This article shows that the presence of HROs in neighboring states can be a substitute for domestic HROs; if domestic HROs are already flourishing, there will be less of a ‘neighbor’ effect. At sufficiently high levels of domestic HRO prevalence within a state, neighboring HROs help domestic HROs use institutionalized substitutes for protest mobilization strategies. Spatial econometric methods are used to test the implications of this theory. These results illuminate the role that non-governmental organizations play in these domestic political processes, and demonstrate the transnational nature of their activities. Non-violent political protest is a direct vehicle for citizens to express their views to their governments in order to demand and engender political change. The achievements of protest movements are numerous and include historical landmarks like the granting of greater civil rights to the African American community in the United States, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of British colonialization in India, and the sparking of democratization processes across post-Soviet countries. Civil society organizations, especially organizations that promote democracy or have a human rights focus, are often important catalysts for these protests. They help organize people on the ground, provide them resources for successful protest activities, including training on non-violent protest techniques, material resources for these activities, and information on the location of targets. Thus, countries with a rich array of civil society organizations, like South Africa or the United States, are able to mobilize civilians to bring about seminal political changes successfully. If civil society organizations are a key catalyst to non-violent protest, how do protest movements achieve their goals when their countries lack a vibrant civil society sector? Are citizens in these states simply less able to organize and participate in non-violent protest, limiting their recourse to political change? Or, could civil society organizations in neighboring states help serve this catalyzing role in the absence of a developed domestic sector? In this article, we argue that civil society organizations both within a state and in the geographic neighborhood of a state can serve to increase the occurrence of domestic non-violent anti-government protests. This implies that states with weak civil

The Effect of US Troop Deployments on Human Rights

US noninvasion troops deployed abroad often try to promote greater respect for human rights in the host country. The host country, having an incentive to retain the troop presence, may choose to comply with these requests. We argue that this effect will not be at play in states with high security salience for the United States (US) (for which the US may not be able to credibly threaten to remove the troops). In these cases, US deployments will provide the leader with security from both internal and external threats that is independent of the local population’s support for the leader. Host state leaders thus become less reliant on (and potentially less responsive to) their local populations, which in turn may lead to increased human rights violations. In this article, we use data on both US troop deployments abroad and on human rights violations to test these arguments from 1982 to 2005.

The Diffusion of International Border Agreements

Can actors’ interactions affect similar, future interactions between those initial actors and others? We investigate this broad question through the lens of international border agreements. In particular, we propose that border agreements can emerge through a previously overlooked mechanism: diffusion. Because border territory is salient, leaders are expected to misrepresent their positions and therefore have difficulty credibly conveying information to their counterpart. To overcome this problem, actors require a costly signal, and we argue that border agreements can serve this purpose. When a state signs a border agreement with a neighboring state, it signals to its other neighbors about both the existence of a bargaining range and the potentially acceptable provisions, thereby helping these other neighbors successfully conclude border agreements with the original signatory states. An analysis of all contiguous dyads during the period 1816–2001 uncovers substantial support for our argument.

Freedom of foreign movement, economic opportunities abroad, and protest in non-democratic regimes

Allowing or restricting foreign movement is a crucial policy choice for leaders. We argue that freedom of foreign movement reduces the level of civil unrest under non-democratic regimes, but only in some circumstances. Our argument relies on the trade-offs inherent in exit and voice as distinct strategies for dealing with a corrupt and oppressive state. By permitting exit and thereby lowering its relative costs, authoritarians can make protest and other modes of expressing dissatisfaction less attractive for potential troublemakers. Liberalizing foreign movement can thus function as a safety valve for releasing domestic pressure. But the degree to which allowing emigration is an effective regime strategy is shaped by the economic opportunities offered by countries receiving immigrants. We find that freedom of foreign movement and the existence of economic opportunities abroad reduce civil unrest in non-democratic states. However, at high levels of unemployment in the developed world, greater freedom of foreign movement actually increases protest.

The Physical Consequences of Fiscal Flexibility: Sovereign Credit and Physical Integrity Rights

Leaders are assumed to face fiscal constraints on their ability to remain in office by competitively distributing public and/or private goods. However, many leaders can relax this constraint by borrowing on sovereign credit markets. This article argues that states with the fiscal flexibility offered by favorable credit terms have the resources necessary to (1) respond to citizen demands with policies other than widespread repression and (2) avoid agency loss that may result in unauthorized repression by state agents. Empirical analyses indicate that creditworthy states have greater respect for physical integrity rights and are less likely to suffer diminished respect for those rights when facing violent dissent or negative shocks to government revenues.

Join the Chorus, Avoid the Spotlight

Which countries are likely to be ignored for their human rights abuses? This article focuses on one particular way that cases of human rights abuse might be overlooked by human rights organizations (HROs): the relative visibility of the state’s abusiveness vis-à-vis its geographic and social peers. HROs are more likely to target abusive states that are located in regions with more HRO resources and/or are surrounded by states that demonstrate higher respect for human rights, as these abuses will stand out much more clearly. Further, human rights treaties can be used by abusive states as a form of strategic “social camouflage,” with states trying to minimize the risk of HRO attention by ratifying human rights treaties to look more like their rights-respecting peers. Using a cross-national time-series research design, this article finds much support for the argument: abusive states that “join the chorus” avoid HRO attention.