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My paper proposes a framework for understanding the emergence of new human rights issues, rights omitted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as well as those mentioned but given little prominence until lately. In recent years, groups such as the mentally and physically disabled, Third World slumdwellers, South Asian Dalits (untouchables), AIDS patients, victims of corporate malfeasance, and the world’s poor have claimed internationally- based rights. In most cases, their efforts have met resistance from governments and powerful corporate interests. Even apparent allies among major human rights NGOs have voiced misgivings about new rights, arguing that rights proliferation may cheapen their traditionally central concerns, civil and political rights. My paper argues that the construction of new human rights norms involves four phases. First, politicized groups frame long-felt grievances as rights. Why and how they do so has received little scholarly attention. Second, they seek to place new rights claims on the international agenda, chiefly by convincing gatekeepers in major international human rights organizations to adopt and promote new rights. This seldom-examined stage is crucial since a handful of powerful NGOs jealously guard a perceived human rights core and exercise significant power in certifying new rights as worthy of international action. Third, NGOs spearhead new conventions before key international bodies. Finally, whether or not formally enacted, new norms require implementation not merely in domestic law but also on the ground. Highlighting the first two phases of this process, my paper draws on theories of social movements and transnational relations to develop new insights about the political construction of new rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the evolution of the international human rights regime with descriptive statistics and multivariate survival regression techniques to explore the main political and economic influences on the propensity for nation states to ratify human rights treaties. The main explanatory variables include the level of democracy, the timing of democratization, wealth, the protection of personal integrity rights, and involvement in warfare. The results of the analysis show robust support for the positive influences on the propensity to ratify human rights treaties for ‘old’ and ‘third wave’ democracies, as well as those countries controlled by leftist governments; mixed influences for ‘fourth wave’ democracies, and negative influences for OPEC countries, wealth, violations of personal integrity rights, and involvement in internal conflict. The results have important implications for our understanding of the internationalization of human rights norms. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States and (Western) Europe have been among the most ardent supporters of international human rights norms. However, despite having been at the forefront of the creation of an international human rights regime after World War II, in recent years, Europe and the United States have taken markedly different approaches to designing international institutions for the protection of human rights. The United States has promoted a system of sovereign inequality, which restricts the sovereignty of non-democratic countries but exempts liberal democracies, and especially itself, from international institutional supervision. In contrast, Europeans, for the most part, have pursued the creation of an international regime of equally diminished sovereignty. This model promotes the creation of substantive international institutional constraints on liberal and non-liberal countries alike. In this paper, I characterize the existing gap between the approaches taken by the United States, on the one hand, and Europe, on the other, as normative dissonance. I argue that normative dissonance is counterproductive to strengthening the international human rights regime and to curtailing the ability of non-democratic countries to restrict the human rights of their citizens. Normative dissonance inhibits the evolution of new customary international norms re-defining the limits of legitimate international interference into the domestic affairs of rights-violating countries. Overcoming the normative dissonance dilemma requires widespread acceptance of one of the two models. I suggest that the equally diminished sovereignty model is more likely to lead to lasting change as it is more likely to gain the widespread legitimacy that is necessary for new international customary norms to evolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost sixty years after the establishment of human rights in international law, the protection of even the most basic ?right to life? remains inconsistent. What explains the gap between the increasingly dominant rhetoric of international human rights and the continued occurrence of gross and systematic violations of basic rights? World culture principles of individualism, secularism and universalism, rather than material conditions, explain why the international community remains largely blind to gross violations committed against collectivities, while it is increasingly sensitized to violations committed against individuals. The paper traces this gap by comparing the creation and evolution of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Genocide Convention. While the UDHR inspired a ?norms cascade? and intensive subsequent transnational activism in its defense, the genocide convention failed to attract much rhetorical or substantive support until the early 1990s. The UDHR offers an interpretation of human rights compatible with world culture principles, while the Genocide convention fails this test by representing a collectivist and group-based version of human rights protection. The international establishment of an individual notion of protecting against gross violations has weakened the status of collectivities. Ironically, it has also made individuals more vulnerable, since they become invisible to international society if they are subsumed under a collective victim of gross abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much of the literature on so-called 'biopolitics' is illuminating and productive, we need not accept all aspects of Agamben's view of what happens when 'life' is placed at the centre of politics. The first part of this paper sets out in more detail Agamben's claims regarding sovereignty and the political significance of 'naked' or 'bare life' for the condition of refugees. The second section suggests that while the breakdown of the distinction between human and citizen is at the heart of the problem faced by refugees (and potentially all bearers of 'human rights'), the 'abstract nakedness' of human beings is politically irrelevant (Arendt, 1958: 8). The argument is made by turning to Hannah Arendt whose writing has been enormously influential for Agamben's thinking but whose effort to rethink the 'right to have rights' he rejects. Arendt warned that there is no such thing as an inborn human dignity. If refugee populations are not to face some inexorable trend toward a rule of 'exception', then it will not be through reclaiming 'bare life'. It will be wholly dependent on the ability to forge a public realm grounded on the appropriate distinction between nature and political artifice. ..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 paper reviews the literature on human rights and conflicts, from which it derives three primary positive effects of human rights on conflicts through institutional guarantees, recognition of human needs and identity transformation. We criticise the existing literature for failing to theorise the complexity of the relationship between human rights and conflict transformation, and point to potential negative impact. In order to do so, we place the three effects in the context of different forms of human rights (individual political, individual social and collective/group rights). We then put forward a conceptual framework to analyse the effect of human rights that focuses on the invocation of human rights as part of securitising or desecuritising moves within a conflict situation. This leads us to proposing two core hypotheses about the relationship between human rights and conflict, relating to the degree of institutionalisation of rights and the particularity of their invocation by conflict actors. We conclude with a discussion of the conditions that affect the positive or negative impact of human rights on conflict transformation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literatures on judicial politics and international human rightslaw are wresting with nearly identical theoretical puzzles yet theyproceed seemingly unaware of the insights of the other. In this paperwe consider how scholars might more efficiently advance their researchagendas by developing greater familiarity with work outside of theircore subfield. In particular, we focus on two theoretical problems:1. Why would an executive delegate to a third party the power topunish its behavior?2. Once an executive so delegates, how can we account for the thirdparty's development of independent political influence?Scholars writing in both literatures tend to focus on only one ofthese questions, yet they are inextricably linked. We argue that asatisfactory answer to the first question depends on the answer to thesecond. Our paper substantiates this assertion and then developsimplications for a research agenda to make progress in both areas ofinquiry. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies find the presence of constitutional provisions regulating government declaration of state of emergency to be related to government respect for various human rights (Davenport 1996, Keith and Poe 2004). What we do not know, however, is how often these provisions are used, how they are used, and maybe more importantly, what is the effect of this use on government respect for human rights. In our paper, we examine the relationship between actual implementation of state of emergency status by governments and those governments’ respect for those internationally-recognized human rights for which derogation is allowed. To do so, we use both a new dataset on state of emergency implementation (195 states, 1990-2006) and the CIRI human rights dataset. Most quantitative studies of government respect for human rights work from the premise of soft positivism, holding states accountable to positive law obligations based on universal moral principles. Some classes of human rights are known as jus cogens norms, or nonderogable rights. States have an obligation to respect these rights/norms with no qualifications allowed. This class includes strong norms against slavery, genocide and physical integrity rights violations (torture, summary execution, etc). However, the bulk of internationally-recognized human rights are not members of this class, and international law gives governments a loophole to suspend their protection when a state of emergency has been declared. This legal qualification exists but existing research based on positive law obligations has not yet begun to factor its implementation into models of state-based human rights behavior. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have recently taken great interest in international human rights agreements (HRAs), typically analyzing ratification of and compliance with one or a handful of 'core' agreements. Findings often vary from treaty to treaty, and consensus is relatively thin. This paper seeks to move the literature forward in three chief respects. First, it presents the Database of UN HRAs, a new database that covers all UN HRAs created between 1945 and 2006. Second, by conducting statistical analyses of ratification of all these agreements, I provide a more comprehensive assessment of the body of international human rights law than currently exists. This enables us to make comparisons across agreements and to identify in a more general manner what factors drive ratification. Third, I present a brief preliminary application of the data to a question that -- despite being of interest to scholars and policymakers alike -- has received little attention in the quantitative HRA literature: whether (and why) the US is 'exceptional' when it comes to HRA ratification ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses network theory to analyze the early days of Amnesty, which ends at the end of the 1970s. The scale-free structure of Amnesty allowed it to spread its ideas quickly, while maintaining a fundamental grasp on the types of rights advocated by the network. Drawing heavily on Amnesty's archival resources, this chapter examines concerning organizational structure from the personalized leadership of Peter Benenson and the initial wave of prisoner rights advocacy successes to the shake-up in 1967, which marked the beginning of the "new" era of Amnesty's work and its eventual campaigns in Latin America against torture, political imprisonment, and disappearances. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do third-party military interventions into civil wars help or harm the human rights of citizens living within these conflict-prone states? While this question has received a myriad of attention and debate within the human rights practitioner community, especially among human rights NGOs operating in states with ongoing or reoccurring civil conflicts, there have been relatively few studies that attempt to answer this question. This paper examines the influence of third party intervention on human rights conditions within countries experiencing civil conflict. We look at a variety of forms of intervention in civil conflict over the period 1981 to 2004 and find that intervention can both encourage and undermine respect for human rights. Specifically, we find that (a) the mere presence of interveners, during conflict or immediately after, do not help current or future human rights among states with civil wars (b) world attention, as evidenced by large numbers of intervening states, sometimes improves human rights, (c) neutral interventions in ongoing conflicts or neutral peacekeeping missions largely hurts current and future human rights performance, and, finally, (d) the intervener's domestic human rights performance does make a difference. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper integrates literatures on social movements and globalization to present a theory on global dimensions of contemporary social movements and examines a case to understand how much global factors impact local social movements. We use the case of social movements by Korean residents in Japan to investigate how international instruments, networks and ideas on ethnic minority rights have combined with local political mobilization to produce political changes in the form of new legislation and court decisions. We study four different fields of rights, social/economic, civil, political and cultural rights, to explore whether some rights are easier to obtain than others, how the strength of international norms on certain types of rights might affect the political outcomes, and how local political climate and tradition circumscribe policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the tension between international human rights law and the strength of the international human rights regime on the whole. This paper suggests that human rights represent more than the unintended consequences of international relations that, as Michael Ignatieff suggests, were only made possible because Western militaries had spare capacity and time to do human rights work. While international interest in humanitarian affairs has ostensibly declined after September 11th, the international human rights regime remains intact. As Stephen Krasner notes, conventions, even though they are entered into voluntarily and even though they have no provisions for enforcement, can alter domestic authority structures by introducing external sources of legitimacy. The human rights regime can thus bring states in congruence with international norms. Human rights will continue to play an important role in international relations because of the way in which they constitute political legitimacy and a source of social power for some state actors, particularly middle power states, and for the victims of oppression and brutality. By limiting certain forms and applications of coercive power, human rights will continue to shape state behaviour because they narrow the range by which states can exercise force legitimately. For draft paper, please email: all01@aber.ac.uk [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

´(will be added later) ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time duration model to test all of these explanations on state commitment to the international convention against torture, one of the most important international human rights treaties. We find fairly strong support for arguments about the importance of norms and of costs, but little support for the domestic instability argument. Among the three types of costs, we find evidence that states care most about the possibility of unintended consequences and least about problems involved with policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Presents research which investigated the domestic and international influences on human rights. Comparison between cultural relativism and universal human rights; Explanations of human rights behavior; Impact of globalization on the protection of human rights.

Research on the theoretical and empirical relationship between transnational corporations and human rights has been both quantitative and qualitative in nature. While claiming to describe the very same relationship, statistical analysis, country case studies, and corporate case studies sometimes differ in their portrayal of the character of the relationship between TNCs and human rights. However, methodological concepts like the ‘methodology of scientific research programs (Lakatos)’ and the ‘level of analysis’ help bridge the gap between the two. Moreover, three explanatory fruitful theoretical concepts help bridge the gap between the two stands further: the sectoral composition of the investments; the host countries’ level of created assets; and the bargaining power of the host countries vis-à-vis the TNCs all introduces the idea that the benefits of TNC activity are relative and not absolute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across cultures, women’s human rights have been not just violated but also unrecognized because the dominant local meaning of what it means to be a human differs with gender. Women’s human rights activists and scholars have dealt with intra-cultural and cross-cultural variety in the development and use of the concept of human rights to promote the rights and development of women. They have used the examples of women’s human rights violations to demonstrate the inseparability of political, civil, social, economic, and cultural rights, and they have challenged the dominant nondiscrimination human rights paradigm. I assess the effectiveness of their approaches for dealing with the problems of women’s human rights recognition and violations. I offer an account of the implicit theory of women’s human rights activism. Their theory is strategically effective and philosophically coherent and an appropriate alternative to foundationalist approaches to universal human rights without undermining the critical capacity of universal human rights as anti-foundationalist approaches tend to do. Informed by interdisciplinary inquiry, respectful of differences across cultures, and respectful of diversity within cultures, this activist-authored cross-cultural human rights theory supports the critical function of the concept of universal human rights and does so in a way that reminds us to be suspicious of those who might use the language of human rights to curtail the realization of some humans’ rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several recent studies have examined the question of whether international human rights agreements (HRAs) improve human rights practices. The empirical findings that characterize this emergent literature provide cause for skepticism about the efficacy of HRAs. This paper hypothesizes to the extent that they institutionalize social dialogue, meaning the democratization of the processes by which human rights standards are articulated, HRAs are more likely to improve human rights practices. The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) tripartite governing structure, which ensures the participation of worker and employer organizations in the creation of national and international labor standards, provides an empirical test of this hypothesis. Using data compiled by the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, I use an ordinal logit model to estimate whether ratification of the ILO’s tripartite structure is correlated with improved state practices with respect to the rights of workers. Preliminary analysis shows that countries that practice tripartism are more likely to exhibit desirable worker’s rights practices than countries that do not. These data suggest that institutionalizing social dialogue may be a viable means of promoting human rights that is quite distinct from strategies of persuasion or coercion. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the practice of social dialogue contributes to improvements in state’s worker’s rights practices and argues that attention to the role of social dialogue more generally could provide an important avenue for future human rights research. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do sovereign governments make international commitment to human right, and under what conditions do they comply with their commitment? Human rights law and treaties stand out as an area in which countries have little incentive to police noncompliance. This paper examines the patterns of commitment to and compliance with the international human right agreements. Especially, this paper reveals the relationship between the treaty ratification and the actual behavior of the state with quantitative approach and tries to find the conditions promoting ratification of human rights treaties as well as violation of them. My arguments are 1) the ratings of human rights treaties are generally better than those of countries that have not, 2) the countries ratified human right treaties are more likely democratic rather than non-democratic, 3) Those effect of political regime is generating audience cost in tandem with the existence of independent media as a transparent informational system. In sum, this paper will argue that the audience cost generated from the political regime and the media will constrain the state behavior to produce better human right practice. That is, human right treaties are not simply window-dressing for the self-interested pursuit of national goals and they make compliance to the treaty obligations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International human rights doctrine and international law have increasingly come to recognize that the international community has an interest in and responsibility to uphold fundamental human rights. This recognition means that states have come under increasing scrutiny for the way in which they treat their own citizens. Although some scholars continue to maintain that universal human rights do not challenge national sovereignty or state control, the immunity that state officials enjoyed from external interference in their domestic affairs has eroded quite significantly over the past fifteen years. Although it ultimately remains the responsibility of national governments to make respect for human rights effective, the international human rights community wields significant power in its ability to ?name and shame? violators. International involvement has been notable not only in bringing pressure on repressive regimes to end human rights violations but also in encouraging successor governments to investigate and punish the serious acts of violence that occurred. To this end, truth commissions have been created, international tribunals have been established, and criminal prosecutions have been initiated based upon the principle of universal jurisdiction.This paper investigates two dramatic instances of international involvement on behalf of human rights in countries that recently experienced systematic and widespread human rights abuses. In 1992, the United Nations negotiated a peace agreement between warring parties in El Salvador that included various measures designed to promote adherence to human rights and created a Truth Commission charged with investigating human rights atrocities and ?putting an end to any indication of impunity on the part of officers of the armed forces.? Although the Truth Commission remained true to its mandate to investigate human rights violations and indicate responsibility, it proved powerless to force the Salvadoran government to adopt its recommendations. Indeed, just days after the Truth Commission issued its report, the legislature passed a general amnesty law that granted unconditional amnesty for all politically motivated crimes committed during the civil war period. In contrast, international efforts to put an end to immunity for human rights abuses in Chile have proven much more successful. While international human rights groups have been active in Chile for decades, a dramatic breakthrough came in 1998, when former Chilean General Augusto Pinochet was detained by British authorities for eighteen months pursuant to an extradition request from a Spanish court which sought to try the general for his complicity in human rights crimes. In a landmark 1999 decision, a British panel of judges ruled that crimes against humanity, such as the systematic torture of individuals for policy reasons, canceled the sovereign immunity traditionally granted to heads of state. Although the British Home Secretary subsequently allowed Pinochet to return to Chile on humanitarian (as opposed to legal) grounds, Pinochet?s arrest had a galvanizing effect on public opinion in Chile and reinforced those currents within Chile that sought to reinvigorate human rights policy. By examining the contrasting outcomes of international involvement on behalf of human rights in El Salvador and Chile, this paper posits that significant advances require a favorable confluence of domestic and international influences. Whereas recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the importance of international norms and transnational advocacy groups in promoting significant advances in the field of human rights, this paper cautions that such transnational efforts are likely to have little success unless governing elites are sympathetic... ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heather Roff argues that national defense cannot be given a utilitarian justification, but should instead be justified in terms of universal moral rights. This paper starts where Roff?s paper leaves off: exactly how should individual rights be used to justify a right of national defense? It is hard to overestimate the historical importance in international law and ethics of a ?domestic analogy? between individual and state rights. Yet philosophical critics have argued powerfully that there is no connection between individual and national rights of self-defense. According to these critics, the moral right of national defense is neither reducible to individual rights of self-defense, nor intelligible by analogy to such rights. Instead, the only way of justifying a national right of self-defense is as a legal right within a morally defensible system of international law (the topic of Terry Nardin?s paper). My own paper investigates all three strategies of justification: Can the right of national defense be reduced to individual rights? Understood by analogy with them? Or should we abandon the appeal to individual rights altogether for a justification that focuses on international law? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyze the rights accorded to homosexuals as a sexual minority with special reference to India. Specifically, the object is two-fold: firstly, to establish that even homosexuals have a legal right to marry in India; secondly, to establish the unconstitutionality of anti-sodomy law in India (Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code). The right to marry being a basic human and fundamental right in India, denying homosexuals this right would amount to discrimination. The principle of non-discrimination on the basis of 'sex' - enshrined in the Indian Constitution - includes within its ambit non discrimination on the basis of 'sexual orientation', thereby implying that 'sexual orientation' is a subset of 'sex'. Further, the paper shall establish the unconstitutionality of anti-sodomy law in India which was essentially a crystallization of the western Judeo-Christian concept of heterosexual paradigm by the British during their rule over India, and how such laws have now been discarded and repealed by a majority of these very western nations. The legal invalidity of the provision shall be based upon: the legal doctrines of unreasonableness, arbitrariness, non-discrimination on the basis of sex and the right to privacy - all enshrined under the Indian Constitution; the doctrine of desuetude; and on the basis that the said law violates India's various international obligations and would in reality lead to the 'underground' spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Throughout the paper references to the global scenario concerning homosexuals and their legal rights would be made which would provide a comparative analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2005, the United Nations General Assembly recognized a limited "responsibility to protect" in cases of mass human rights abuses. This recognition, however, was full of caveats, representing a significant level of unease with the concept and with recognizing it as an international norm with some sort of binding quality. These caveats indicate traditional realist concerns with taking actions which are only in the perceived interest of the state. Yet, the fact that the recognition came at all indicates a significant level of acceptance of the responsibility to protect (RTP) norm. Yet, what the norm actually entails, as with its precursor, the genocide convention, is unclear. This paper will examine the multiple meanings of protection. It will also place the discussion about RTP in the rationalist/constructivist debate, raising questions about how to explain the force of the RTP norm. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks in detail at models other than the current "International Law of Human Rights" through which Muslim states and their representatives might be better able to build new international relationships and secure enduring "cultural living space." It looks first at existing attempts, namely the 1990 "Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam" and then speculates through an analysis of historical precedents (the Treaty of Hudaybiyah and treaties enacted by the Ottoman Sultans) from within Islamic history on the most appropriate way forward in the current debate with "Human Rights".The paper will suggest that these precedents indicate that Muslim and non-Muslim states are better advised to sign multiple bilateral treaties, or multilateral single issue treaties, rather than multilateral agreements that purport to have universal application for all time. From the perspective of non-Muslim states, I will argue it is far more likely that the content of such a treaty will be enforceable and enforced in Muslim states - a concern that continues to pre-occupy many western states on the UN. From the perspective of Muslim states, I will also argue that such an approach would address their particular local needs and concerns without sacrificing economic and political ties with the West - an issue which has come to the forefront with the rise to power of Hamas in the Palestinian territories. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: When do states take human rights into account in their foreign policies? This paper examines the relative role of human rights and economic self-interest in shaping aid policy during the era of globalization.I develop an argument that human rights abuses in the recipient state will prompt aid reduction or cessation by donors only when the recipient is neither economically nor strategically valuable to the donor. Further, donors may additionally refuse to punish states that are of strategic importance to major-power allies, such as the US.I then assess the hypotheses I have derived through quantitative and qualitative analyses of the foreign policies of OECD donors between 1996 and 2004. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is increasingly common to hear activists and commentators from a variety of professions associate performance of regimes with protections of basic human rights; rights first articulated in the UN?s post-World War II era Declaration of International Human Rights. Working more quietly have been social scientists many of whom to this point have searched primarily for linear relationships between both domestic and international conditions and the degree that respect for basic human rights are realized within states. In this paper I will examine a related but more specific question that has equal theoretical import. That question is what precisely are the odds that any type of regime is likely to be more (or less) violent toward its citizens? I hypothesize that the odds ratio of extreme violence to no violence within any state is higher in weak democracies than in both strong democracies and autocracies in contexts of ethnic fractionalization, economic change, civil and international war and so forth. From here, other theoretically driven hypotheses are tested across varied categories of violence (i.e. magnitudes of violence from low to high intensity). These ?standard-based? categories are derived from annual Amnesty International and State Department reports and known collectively as the Political Terror Scales. Coverage is across 179 countries for the years 1976 to 1993. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary legal enforcement of international human rights law occurs not in the international sphere, but in the domestic courts of states. However, the field of international adjudication and enforcement is not entirely bare. The majority of the Treaty Monitoring Bodies established under the relevant international human rights instruments now have the jurisdiction to consider communications by individuals alleging specific violations of human rights, to adjudicate on those allegations and to monitor the response of the relevant State Parties. This paper considers whether these bodies fulfil a useful function in extending the reach of international human rights law into society, and if that role is growing. Looking to the future, the paper asks whether these bodies are able to deliver strong international adjudication and enforcement of human rights, or if those who dream of such stronger enforcement should look towards a potential International Court of Human Rights to extend the reach of international human rights law from legal text to guarantor of rights in society? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become increasingly commonplace for states to consider human rights in foreign policy. These actions come despite the international norm of non-intervention, begging the question: when will states choose to violate this norm to support human right ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of human rights norms during the 1970’s and 1980’s was accompanied by a new systematic and widespread use of forced disappearance, particularly in Latin America. Though we continue to see the development of an international human rights regime the use of forced disappearance as a method of state terror remains as well. Thus the question becomes: how effective is the human rights regime in curbing this type of repressive state behavior?Scholars have suggested forced disappearance is used in order to avoid negative international attention and prosecution (Brysk 1994; Lutz & Kikkink 2000). The human rights regime is a large distributor of costs; potential penalties range from reductions in foreign aid to prosecutions in international courts. We propose states choose a particular type of repression in order to maximize benefits while minimizing costs. Therefore, we expect states integrated into the human rights regime will utilize forced disappearance rather than more detectable forms of state repression in this pursuit. To test this argument we employ an ordered logistic regression for a sample of all human rights violating countries between 1981 and 2004; we utilize Cingranelli & Richards (1999) escalating ordering of human rights violations for the analysis. The Landman covenants data (2005) is utilized to estimate integration into the human rights regime. The CIRI Human Rights Dataset (2004) provides us with our dependent variable. We additionally control for factors previously found to influence government respect for human rights. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore, with quantitative data and analyses, why nation-states with very negative human rights records tend to sign and ratify human rights treaties at rates similar to those of states with positive records. First, we demonstrate the empirical phenomenon, across a set of international human rights treaties. Second, we employ multivariate analyses to examine the question of whether the lack of integration between policy and practice that is characteristic of human rights violators leaves them free to engage in decoupled subscription to globally fashionable rights norms. We find some evidence, in our (presently very preliminary) analyses supporting the idea and propose to pursue the matter much further in the coming months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine an empirical puzzle about the impact of the international human rights regime on local human rights practices: despite the rise in state ratification of international human rights treaties, human rights violations are not decreasing at all. Both international legal and international relations scholars have been unable to explain this puzzle. We propose a world society approach that explains the decoupling between policy (ratification) and practice as well as positive effects of general linkage to international society. Our core arguments are that the global institutionalization of human rights has created an international context in which (1) governments ratify human rights treaties as a matter of window-dressing rather than a serious commitment to the cause of human rights, thus creating decoupling possibilities, but (2) the emergent global legitimacy of human rights, characterized by world-wide government linkage to international society, exerts institutional effects that improve actual human rights practices. Our statistical analyses on a global sample of government repression during the period 1976 to 1999 find support for both of our arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008 the Special Representative to the Secretary General on Business and Human Rights submitted a report detailing a governance framework regarding the duties of the relevant stakeholders. The framework places the duty to protect human rights on the shoulders of states. In the context of conflict zones, the corporate host state's ability to fulfill its duty to protect human rights is diminished at best, and often rendered ineffectual. This paper explores alternative governance tools that may assist in securing and stabilizing communities in situations such as these. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the World Trade Organization to that of the Organization of American States and the European Union, international legal regimes are integral to international governance, each one ordering social and political interactions amongst states. In the contemporary world, however, these international legal regimes come to play an important role in domestic governance. Thus, domestic law and governance must be understood in light of such international legal regimes. Governance through international legal regimes, nonetheless, does not mean national legal order is meaningless and ineffectual; rather, governance entails the relevance of national legal order alongside its international counterpart. The relevance of both international and domestic legal order to governance, however, begets the question of why do international and domestic legal orders reconcile and operate in harmony as a single entity. In this paper, I will look at the domestification of international law to examine the process by which international and domestic legal orders are reconciled and harmonized. More specifically, I ask: why did the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms integrate into British law through formal incorporation via the Human Rights Act of 1998? In exploring this question, I will bring the role of individuals and social groups to the forefront of the explanation in contrast to state-centric explanations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]