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Over the past decade the increased prominence of international human rights tribunals has posed a challenge to skeptics who believe that human rights institutions are nothing but paper tigers. Today, states increasingly comply with the tribunals' rulings, even when that means changing their domestic policies and practices. In this paper, I compare the experiences of three states--Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia--in complying with two Inter-American human rights tribunals. I suggest that we can understand compliance as a costly yet credible signal states send to domestic and international audiences about their commitment to human rights. In the absence of domestic institutions, cheap talk persists, but for those states that have strong domestic institutions, compliance is both credible and potentially costly. This finding has implications for the future of international human rights adjudication and for the literature on compliance with international institutions more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between wartime sacrifice and changes in civic membership in the United States, arguing for the reconsideration of the Cold War "expansion" of civil rights by incorporating lenses of gender and sexuality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the linkages between human rights practices of countries and people's perceptions of the human rights situation in their country. Previous studies demonstrate that people's attitudes about the human rights situation in their country are shaped by the level of government respect for human rights. However, the evidence for these claims is narrowly based on the study of a public opinion survey administered in 17 countries. The authors provide a more definitive test whether the theoretical linkage between objective conditions and people's perceptions holds in a much larger set of countries. Our results support the linkage argument between levels of government respect and people's perceptions.

Activists and students of human rights are ambivalent about states. On the one hand, they rely on states as the primary instruments for securing rights. They urge states to adopt instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and to live up to those commitments. On the other hand, they regard states with suspicion, as the primary abusers of rights, and seek to expose states that fail to adhere to their commitments under international law. Quantitative studies of the determinants of human rights also implicitly assume that states are the exclusive abusers of rights. Poe and Tate (1994), for instance, characterize “the abuse of internationally recognized human rights, specifically those having to do with the integrity of the person” as “state terrorism,” excluding the possibility that such rights could be abused by non-state actors (868, fn 1). Despite, or perhaps because of this ambivalence, there has been no systematic attempt to theorize or test the impact of state strength on human rights. This is an important oversight. The importance of state capacity for a variety of outcomes, including economic development, democracy and the rule of law, is increasingly recognized in the field. Given the well-established relationship between human rights and these factors, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that state capacity would enhance human rights protections as well. In this essay I test the impact of state capacity on rights to personal security. I first develop a theoretical account of the importance of state capacity for human rights. I include indicators of state capacity in a multivariate model of human rights abuses to date that controls for factors already known to be important predictors of human rights abuse. (Poe and Tate 1994; Poe, Tate and Keith 1999). State strength is an important predictor of personal security, even more influential than democracy. The reason, I argue, is that since the end of the Cold War, state failure has replaced state repression as the greatest threat to human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the extent to which sovereign states within a decentralized system of international relations can be effective in ensuring compliance with international human rights norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies four models of how national and international human rights are being asserted to address health issues and its implication for understanding "post-national citizenship." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the potential role of networks of national human rights institutions in international human rights politics and processes of democratic transitions. It highlights their significance in the context of global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary attempt at setting the record straight on the content of the "human rights" concept in 19th century American political thought. Many scholars have overlooked its full history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some scholars point to the establishment of International Criminal Court (ICC) as a testament to both the power of non-state actors in creating international institutions and the rise of the “individual accountability” norm. But this argument fails to explain why state leaders were unable to establish such a Court immediately following the Nuremberg trials, when the principle of individual accountability in international law was arguably at its apex. In this paper, I propose that the ICC became a viable option in the 1990s because leaders of the US and UK recognized that such a court might reduce their costly role as the “accountability police.” Specifically, a Court could relieve them of having to respond to an irreconcilable set of pressures: human rights advocates demanding that perpetrators be held accountable and foreign government leaders insisting that the sovereign immunity principle be upheld. The core argument is that the increased countervailing pressures led US and UK national executives to want to “outsource” prosecution authority to a third actor. To evaluate this argument, I will compare the 1990s establishment of the ICC with three earlier, failed attempts to create some form of an international criminal court. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent events, particularly the Bush Administration's controversial policy at Guantanamo Bay and skepticism towards the Geneva Convention, have focused the world's attention on the need for limits on executive power in democracies. Many scholars have looked back to the authoritarian writings of Carl Schmitt to explain this behavior, because Schmitt insisted that even democracies need to be willing to utilize emergency powers to defend themselves from public enemies. Yet identifying Schmittian logic is not the same as finding solutions to the problems that face democracies in peril. This paper assesses several recent critical responses to Schmitt which are each concerned with the possibility of human rights catastrophes stemming from unbounded power. Focused on the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, we ask several questions: are their critiques of the dangers of the state of exception sufficient to warrant global reorganization and limitation of power? If so, what kind of international rights, laws and institutions would be necessary? Would their ideas help resolve the dilemma of "friend-foe" relations or simply displace them as Schmitt feared would happen? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2008, Texas executed a Mexican national in violation of international law, five months after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the president could not compel states to honor an international treaty and a 2004 International Court of Justice order. This is one of four recent death penalty cases in which the justices divided sharply over the role of international laws and norms. Three of these cases referenced international standards and practices in striking state laws to bring US death penalty practice more in line with world human rights standards, while in the most recent case they limited the reach of international law. In each of these cases, the justices divided over the role of institutions (especially the court, but also the executive) governmental level (state, national and transnational) and of international law. This paper describes and analyzes these arguments with attention to the realist, liberal internationalist, and social constructionist approaches to international relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive literature on transitional justice has emerged in recent years and the application of these mechanisms has become a goal of many human rights NGOs and activists. As a corollary of this, general or blanket amnesty has increasingly become viewed as an inappropriate means of dealing with past violence - particularly with the advancement of international law in the area of human rights. Indeed some scholars have argued that more and more newly democratizing states throughout the world are deciding to hold perpetrators of past abuses accountable for their acts through truth commissions and trials, a trend that has been termed the justice cascade. This paper seeks to empirically assess this claim using the newly constructed University of Wisconsin-Madison's Transitional Justice Data Base that tracks transitional justice mechanisms in more than 175 countries over 30 years. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the idea of a universal person in theoretical approaches to international justice and offers a conceptualization of the individual and the state that specifies the scope of human rights and the conditions for state sovereignty. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will respond to the question, why have Afro-Brazilians been unable to mount a mass movement on the scale of the civil rights movement through an interpretative analysis of the Brazilian Black movement and the civil rights movement. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and why do states commit to international human rights agreements (HRAs)? We seek to move the literature on HRA ratification forward in two chief ways. First, whereas previous research has focused on one agreement or on a handful of 'core' HRAs, we examine ratification of all UN HRAs using a new dataset that includes 39 human rights conventions, covenants, and protocols. Not only does this approach provide a more comprehensive picture of the universe of international human rights law, but it also enables us to conduct tests that are not possible in a one-treaty framework. The evidence suggests substantial variation in states' propensity to ratify depending on the issue-area covered and the type of agreement under consideration. Second, whereas existing accounts have generally focused on domestic institutional determinants of ratification, external pressures, and expectations about future consequences, we also explore how public opinion shapes the ratification decision. Our findings, although preliminary, indicate that the link between public support for UN involvement in the promotion of human rights and ratification of these agreements is real. We discuss two potential mechanisms behind this relationship, and explore steps for further research to parse out causality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the rationale, mandate and effectiveness of the East Timor Serious Crimes Panel and the Indonesian Human Rights Court in addressing violations of international human rights during the 1999 UN administered independence ballot in East Timor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine state commitment to international human rights treaties limiting sovereignty. We test explanations based on norms, domestic democratic volatility, and domestic costs. We find norms and domestic costs are the best predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emerging international norm of acceptance of non-state actor involvement in the provision of humanitarian assistance and protection of human rights within sovereign states. This norm is based more in naturalist understandings of law and a sense of shared moral obligation than in explicit inclusion of non-state actors within the positive legal framework. The lawfulness of some non-state actor activities is likely to be challenged and more clearly defined as those activities come into conflict with the exercise of sovereignty of states. These changes promise to have significant repercussions for the definition of sovereignty itself as well as for the state-centric theoretical basis of international law. A new basis must consider non-state actors as agents capable of certain forms of activity internationally and subject to international legal obligations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, hardly any aspect of state authority has been left untouched by international law. Yet despite the central importance of international treaties to international order, we still have much to learn about why treaties exist and why states join them. During the last decade, scholars have sought answers to these long-ignored questions and, in the process, have opened the door to a deeper understanding of the role of international law in shaping state behavior. This article aims to pry the door open even further by examining states’ decisions to commit to international human rights treaties. It makes several specific, testable predictions about state behavior. To take one example, it predicts that states with unlimited executive power and poor human rights records will be no less likely to commit to human rights treaties than states with unlimited executive power and good human rights records—because there is little prospect that the treaties will be enforced against the state. Conversely, it predicts that states with significant limits on executive power and poor human rights records will be less likely to commit to human rights treaties than other nations—precisely because they are the countries where the treaties are most likely to lead to changes in behavior. This and other predictions are put to the test using a quantitative analysis of the practices of more than 160 countries during a period of over 40 years. The article concludes by briefly considering how treaties should be designed to better achieve their goals in light of the findings and by briefly outlining several avenues for future research. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can claims of entitlement to a universal human right be legitimized in terms of reason and nature and not just at the level of an historical tale of the development of institutions and the public acceptance of covenants since WWII? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lifecycle of the norm abolishing the death penalty for child offenders who are 18 years or younger took 80 years to complete. From its origin in Russia in 1922 to its twilight in the United States (U.S.) in 2005, a total of 134 countries are believed to have abolished the death penalty for child offenders. This study will present the history of abolition for child offenders globally. Through international relations theory, especially constructivism, world polity approaches from sociology, and international legal theory, it will argue that the norm emerged primarily in European and Latin American countries that were well-integrated into the international system. Emergence was followed by a rapid cascade that occurred in the early 1960s, ushering in a period of acceptance that ended in 2005 with U.S. compliance. This study will also assess arguments that suggest there were different motivations for abolition at different periods in the norm’s lifecycle. It will address the motivations of states that comply as well as the primary methods of diffusion for early and late adopters, the role of international and regional law in shaping state behavior, the intrinsic quality of the norm and other indicators such as region, regime type, gross domestic product and the advent of compulsory education. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguities in international law lead to a new classification of individual in the context of international security. Russian nationals living in Estonia are at risk of remaining "citizenshipless" with no institution to guarantee them of any rights. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do states ratify international human rights treaties? These treaties are unique in the arena of international law in that the material costs and benefits of ratification and compliance do not lend themselves to induce ratification, yet states do ratify such treaties. Previous work suggests that states ratify human rights treaties to send a political signal or statement to other states in the international system (Hathaway 2002). I argue that states ratify human rights treaties to send a signal of their nominal support for human rights within their borders; this signal is sent to the domestic populations of liberal democratic states who might otherwise pressure their governments to not interact with these states with abusive reputations, particularly in the economic realm. States that ratify international human rights treaties thus have a competitive advantage over non-ratifiers in attracting economic and political interaction. The pattern of ratification should thus be similar to that of economic liberalization as explained by Simmons and Elkins (2004). I theorize that the ratification status of other states alters the consequences of a state considering ratifying the same treaty and informs the state of the consequences of doing so. I argue that this dynamic informs the decisions states make as to whether they will ratify an international human rights treaty. I use a Cox proportional hazard model to estimate the effect of spatial lag regressors on a state's risk of ratifying the ICCPR, using ratification data from 1948-2002. I find that states do glean information about the consequences of ratification from the ratification status of other states and this information figures into their decision-making process. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study considers factors influencing the use of coercive foreign policies by France, the United Kingdom and the United States as a means to enforcement international human rights laws between 1990 and 1994, and the effectiveness of such policies. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop and test theoretical model of treaty adoption and compliance that considers how features of the domestic judicial system influence state choices to adopt and comply with international human rights norms. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]