Sam R. Bell

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 ...

Changing Lanes or Stuck in the Middle: Why Are Anocracies More Prone to Civil Wars?

Past research on regime type and civil war points to anocratic regimes as having a high probability of civil war onset. The specific characteristics of anocratic regimes that lead to their predisposition for civil war have been left unexplained. In this article, the authors examine how the transitional characteristics of anocracy explain the enhanced risk of civil war onset. The results point to three important conclusions. First, anocratic regimes are most likely to experience civil war in the first few years of their duration. Second, transitions into anocracy from democracy leave states at a higher risk of civil war. Third, the probability of civil war onset increases with the magnitude of a transition into anocracy.

Coercion, capacity, and coordination: Predictors of political violence

Using a risk assessment method developed by Gurr and Moore (American Journal of Political Science 41: 1079–1103, 1997) and applying O’Brien’s (Journal of Conflict Resolution 46: 791–811, 2002) risk assessment metrics, we present a global, comparative, cross-national model predicting the states where political violence is likely to increase. Our model predicts more political violence when governments violate the physical integrity rights of their citizens—especially when they frequently imprison citizens for political reasons or make them “disappear”. These coercive techniques may create more citizen dissatisfaction than other types of violations of physical integrity rights, because citizens perceive political imprisonment and disappearances as the direct result of the deliberate policy choices of politicians. Our model also forecasts more political violence in weak states and states that allow dissatisfied citizens to coordinate their anti-government activities. Specifically, we demonstrate that political violence tends to be higher if governments respect their citizens’ right to freedom of assembly and association and offer widespread use of mobile phone and internet technology.

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.

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

What you don’t know can hurt you: Information, external transparency, and interstate conflict, 1982-1999

This paper examines the role that information plays in conflict behavior by focusing on the external component of governmental transparency. Building from the crisis bargaining and the diversionary strategic conflict avoidance literature, I argue that governments that are more externally transparent are less likely to initiate conflict and are less likely to have the opportunity to use force for diversionary purposes. Using original data on the access that foreign media has to states, a large-N statistical analysis is implemented. The empirical analysis suggests that states that are more externally transparent are less likely to initiate conflict and that these same states are less likely to respond to domestic challenges with diversionary uses of force. This research demonstrates the important role of governmental transparency and provides support for some of the conclusions of crisis bargaining models and the strategic conflict avoidance argument in the diversionary literature.

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.

Power, territory, and interstate conflict

This paper examines how territorial claims between states condition the effect of power on interstate conflict. I argue that when the weaker state in a dyad controls a piece of contested territory, increases in power for the state that does not hold the territory lead to increases in the probability of conflict initiation. This has important implications for our understanding of the role that territorial claims play in conflict processes and attempts at conflict management, and provides support for the theoretical claim that the relationship between power and conflict is conditioned by the distribution of benefits.

Force Multipliers: Conditional Effectiveness of Military and INGO Human Security Interventions

Following humanitarian disasters, does the presence of both military and civilian international nongovernmental organization (INGO) interveners help or harm human security outcomes? This article argues that INGOs and military interventions can individually aid in less complex human security outcomes, while for more complex human security outcomes, joint INGO and military interventions can have a “force multiplier” effect. The implications of this theoretical argument are tested using a cross-national time-series dataset of postcivil-conflict and postnatural-disaster states, combined with data on military and INGO humanitarian interventions. The results largely support the main premise of this articles theory: Both military and INGO humanitarian interveners can help bring about human security outcomes, but the necessity of both interveners engaging simultaneously varies by the complexity of the human security objective.

Passenger or Driver? A Cross-National Examination of Media Coverage and Civil War Interventions

Existing research on civil war interventions provides contradicting evidence about the role that the media plays in affecting the likelihood of intervention. To date, studies often focus on specific cases (frequently by the United States) leaving it unclear whether the medias influence extends more broadly. In this article we examine this question cross-nationally and argue that we need to account for the possibility that interventions also lead to increases in media coverage. We test our hypotheses using cross-national data on civil war interventions and media coverage. These data include a new measure of media coverage of 73 countries experiencing civil wars between 1982 and 1999. These data allow us to determine whether media coverage is more likely to drive leaders’ decisions or follow them. Toward this end we employ a two-stage conditional maximum likelihood model to control for potential endogeneity between media attention and interventions. The results suggest a reciprocal positive relationship between media attention and civil conflict interventions. Specifically, an increase of one standard deviation in media coverage raises the probability of intervention 68%.