Michael Stohl

United States Human Rights Policy and Foreign Assistance

This study furthers the inquiry into the relationship between human rights and U.S. bilateral foreign aid. We build the most comprehensive data set to date, extending the time period (1976–1995) and enlarging the number of countries under review (140). Rhetoric aside, human rights considerations did play a role in determining whether or not a state received military aid during the Reagan and Bush administrations, but not for the Carter or Clinton administration. With the exception of the Clinton administration, human rights was a determinant factor in the decision to grant economic aid, albeit of secondary importance. To the question “Does a states human rights record affect the amount of U.S. bilateral aid it receives?” we answer yes for economic aid, but no for military aid. Human rights considerations are neither the only nor the primary consideration in aid allocation.

Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Assistance from Nixon to Carter

This paper reports some preliminary findings on the relationships between United States policies towards human rights as it is expressed in Presidential policy and U.S. military and economic assistance to nations which have a substantial record of human rights threats and abuses. It examines these relationships from the start of the Nixon presidency through the end of the Carter administration. The statistical findings indicate that under Presidents Nixon and Ford foreign assistance was directly related to levels of human rights violations, i.e. more aid flowed to regimes with higher levels of violation, while under President Carter no clear statistical pattern emerged. It is concluded, therefore, that the Carter administration did not implement a policy of human rights which actually guided the disposition of military and economic assistance.

The Role of Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Assistance Policy: A Critique and Reappraisal

In a recent study, David Cingranelli and Thomas Pasquarello (1985) discovered a modest positive relationship between certain types of U.S. foreign assistance and human rights behavior. We believe a number of factors raise concerns over the validity of these results. Following some discussion, a brief and simplified reanalysis is presented, which varies the cases, economic data, and human rights measures employed by Cingranelli and Pasquarello. This reanalysis highlights a lack of robustness in the original results. We conclude with a brief plea for more judgment and diversity in the design of quantitative work on human rights.

Government violence and repression : an agenda for research

A form of terrorism that is receiving increased attention is human rights abuses on the part of individual states. This study, written by specialists from several countries, attempts to define the parameters of state terrorism, analyze its causes, and identify the types of data and methods needed for policy-relevant research. It focuses on state use of acts of terror to intimidate, pacify, coerce, or destroy whole populations, groups, or classes of citizens. The problems encountered in the study of state terrorism, particularly in the areas of definition and measurement and in the difficulty of obtaining complete and reliable data, are first discussed. The political origins of state violence and the mechanisms that sustain it are traced in a theoretical analysis, and the relation of national security ideology to the imposition of terrorist measures is explored. The forms of state terrorism and repression encountered in the Third World are considered next. Other topics covered include genocide, terrorism and counterterrorism in the context of democratic society, and the international terrorist impact of superpower politics. Finally, the prospects of bringing state terrorism under the control of international law are assessed.

Secret Agencies: : The Communicative Constitution of a Clandestine Organization

This special issue challenges scholars to consider the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of viewing organizations as ‘constituted in and through human communication.’ Interrogating the work of one of the most influential approaches to the study of the constitutive nature of organizing, the oeuvre of James Taylor and his colleagues or what has become known as the Montreal School, we identify an implicit assumption of organizational transparency. We suggest that unpacking ‘the transparency principle’ helps build a richer framework that builds upon the foundations of the Montreal School, facilitates empirical inquiry, and highlights several aspects of the social context which are typically taken for granted within organizational studies. Expanding Taylor et al.’s orientation to clandestine organizations, we address the question posed by the editors in the call for papers: ‘How does a communication-as-constitutive of organization’s perspective shape understandings of the organization’s embeddedness in social contexts?’ Clandestine organizations embody secret agency and intriguing possibilities for understanding the ways in which social actors communicatively constitute organizations. The metaconversations of clandestine organizing take place in a complex socio-political historical context, and exploration of these metaconversations not only furthers our understanding of illicit and clandestine systems but also provides new insights into the communicative constitution of contemporary organizations in general.

Human Rights, Nation States, and NGOs: Structural Holes and the Emergence of Global Regimes This is a revised and expanded version of M. Stohl, “Human Rights NGOs, the UN and Global Responsibility: Standard Setting, Activists and the Development of Norms” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Communication Association, Salt Lake City, February 14–16, 2003.

This article adapts Burts 1992 network theory of structural holes to explore dynamic developments within global organizational networks, questioning the proposition that alternative forms of organizing are replacing the nation state as the central figure on the global stage. Our analysis of structural holes within the emerging global human rights regime moves beyond Burts “ideal” conception of “communication as information” and expands Burts notion of competitive environments, reconciling tensions associated with two opposing network theories, network closure and structural holes. Analyzing two interdependent historical cases—the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the subsequent creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975—we demonstrate the ways in which filling structural holes not only strengthens NGOs’ positions within the global network but simultaneously reinforces the robustness of the entire regime network and the nation state.

Media Framing of Terrorism: Implications for Public Opinion, Civil Liberties, and Counterterrorism Policies

Abstract This study presents experimental findings on the impact of media framing of the 2005 London bombings. A total of 371 American participants were exposed to one of two frames to test their effect on public attitudes towards civil liberties and Muslims, and support for counterterrorism policies. Results show that the “domestic homegrown” frame produces greater increases in fear than the “international” frame. This leads to greater support for restricting civil liberties of Muslims and, under certain circumstances, general feelings of negativity toward Muslims. The study also finds support for the hydraulic effect of framing in that the domestic homegrown frame suppresses party identification in attitude formation.

Swamps, Hot Spots, Dick Cheney and the Internationalization of Terrorist Campaigns

The opportunity to introduce the four articles in this special issue and to reflect on their meaning and contribution is most welcome. Lai’s “Draining the Swamp” examines the ability of a state to impose costs on terrorist groups by examining the relationship between states’ strength and the generation of terror, Braithwaite’s and Li’s “Transnational Terrorism Hot Spots” employs local spatial statistics to identify terrorism hot spot neighborhoods and their relationship to future patterns of terrorism within the neighborhood, Koch’s and Cranmer’s “Testing the Dick Cheney Hypothesis” examines if governments of the left are more likely to attract terrorist attacks than governments of the right, and Bapat’s “The Internationalization of Terrorist Campaigns” explores why terrorist organizations make the choice to internationalize conflicts by adopting a third-party state as host. To best appreciate both the contribution that these articles make and the work that still needs to be done it is useful to place them in the context of the literature on terrorism of the past few decades. Prior to September 11, 2001, there had been a series of systematic reviews of the terrorism literature that explored many different facets of the literature. There is much to be learned from these critiques. Remarkably, taken together, and regardless of when they were done, they have similar findings. First, in clear distinction to the four articles presented here, a consistent problem within the literature of terrorism is that, for the most part, scholars have not approached the study of terrorism with the purpose of developing theoretically grounded studies and consequently they have not applied rigorous research methods to its study. Twenty years ago, Schmid and Jongman argued that “Perhaps as much as 80% of the literature is not research-based in any rigorous sense. . . .” (Schmid & Jongman, 1988: 219). Ariel Merari concurred and asserted that “By and large, terrorism literature is composed mainly of studies which rely on relatively weak research methods” (Merari, quoted by Schmid and Jongman, 1988: 179) and thus “resembles hearsay rather than twentieth century science” (Merari, 1991: 95). And Ted Gurr agreed, arguing that “With a few clusters of exceptions there is, in fact, a disturbing lack of good empirically grounded research on terrorism” (Gurr, 1988: 2). Putting more bite into the critique Merari suggests that “This may well be an understatement” (Merari, 1991: 220). Thus, Schmid and Jongman could conclude “Much of the writing in the crucial areas of terrorism research . . . is impressionistic, superficial, and at the same time also pretentious, venturing far-reaching generalizations on the basis of episodal evidence” (1988: 177). A decade later, Andrew Silke compared this dearth of quantitative analysis in terrorism research, for the period at the end of the 1990s with other social sciences, specifically forensic psychology and criminology. By analyzing articles published from 1995 to 2000,

States, Terrorism and State Terrorism: The Role of the Superpowers

This chapter explores the context within which we may understand the persistence of state and in particular, superpower, violence and terrorism in domestic and international affairs.1 The analysis begins with the introduction of an expected utility approach and the assumptions which underlie it in the context of understanding the choice of terrorism as a strategy or tactic by political actors. The relationship between the structure of the state system and the role of violence in politics is then considered. Next, propositions which characterise the post-second-World-War world as they apply to state behaviour in the international system are presented. The fourth section discusses the basic patterns of superpower terrorist behaviour in the international context. There is contained herein no attempt to count events and test predictions of actual patterns. This task is sidestepped because at present there does not exist a comprehensive data set from which to draw such information (see Mitchell et al., 1986, for an analysis of the difficulties of creating such a data source).

Don't confuse me with the facts: knowledge claims and terrorism

It became commonplace after 11 September 2001 to declare that the events changed ‘everything’ and that the world would never again be as it was before that date. Many spoke of the dividing line of the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 world, and it became commonplace to assert that the events conclusively demonstrated the validity of the thesis that there was a ‘new’ terrorism, at base religious and apocalyptic, more networked rather than hierarchical and very different from the ‘old’ terrorism. This article reflects upon and evaluates the development of knowledge claims about insurgent terrorism and measures them against the standard of how well these claims have advanced the formulation of theories of terrorism that can be subjected to observational testing. The article examines changes in the lethality of terrorism, the characterisations, boundaries and control structures of the network claims and differences amongst the old and new terrorists and concludes that claims of a ‘new terrorism’ are vastly misleading.