Browsing by Subject "Repression"
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Item Dictatorships and the Globalization of Repression(2020-07) Kaire De Francisco, JoseDictatorships today are as violent as they were during the Cold War. This has surprised international observers, who a few years ago thought globalization would help protect human rights in these countries. Despite international efforts to hold abusive dictators accountable, human rights appear to have gotten worse in many dictatorships. To explain this puzzle, I first note how globalization threatens the political and economic interests of elites in dictatorships. In turn, elites demand compensation from the dictator. Where elites can credibly threaten the dictator with removal, the dictator is likely to increase repression to placate allies and avoid a coup. This compensation dynamic between autocrats and their ruling coalition explains why some dictatorships respond with increased violence to globalization while others do not. It also helps explain how different elements of globalization interact with each other in the domestic politics of autocracies to improve or weaken human rights.Item The Fallen Whig: The Durability of Dominant Party Rule in Liberia(2023-05) Wehyee, YakasahHow did a dominant party regime run by manumitted slaves from the USA emerge in Liberia at the height of the 19th century “Scramble for Africa,” nearly 40 years before the Bolshevik Revolution established a supposed template for durable one-party systems? What tools did the members of Liberia’s ruling True Whig Party (TWP) use to create the world’s longest-lived dominant party regime? Although scholars of authoritarianism have long sought to explain the durability of dominant party regimes such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, Liberia’s TWP has eluded all previous efforts. My research contributes to this literature by positing a novel explanation for Liberia’s dominant party regime’s durability. Using Gershewski’s Three Pillars of Authoritarianism (legitimation, co-optation, and repression), I argue that the 19th century colonial environment created conditions that pressured Liberia’s various settler factions to construct a dominant party regime, the TWP, to avoid state death. Once created, the regime survived by leveraging legitimation, co-optation, and repression to secure elite and mass level cooperation as well as international acceptance. Rather than centering my analysis on a single element of the three pillars of authoritarian stability as has been the convention in the literature, my research offers the first glimpse of a dominant party’s strategic application of all three pillars, thereby enriching our understanding of how these regimes work.Item The impact of human rights law in time(2013-07) Dancy, Geoffrey T.International human rights law is often disparaged either for having no positive impact on government repression or for having negative unintended consequences that lead to even worse repressive violence. Most empirical scholarship on human rights indicates that the root causes of widespread repression--authoritarianism, democratic instability, and civil war--are beyond the reach of legal rules. The contribution of this project is to demonstrate that human rights law in fact has an important role to play in addressing these root causes. I argue that the human rights legal action, under certain conditions, promotes democracy and prevents conflict recurrence. This takes time. By slowly changing state-society interactions, the pursuit of human rights legalization is causally related to lessened repressive violence. Importantly, though, these contributions are not guaranteed, and they are dependent on the creation of domestic human rights constituencies. In support of my argument, I uncover relationships between human rights legal actions and regime change, broadly defined, that have so far remained unobserved. These relationships have been obscured within the existing literature for two reasons. First, detailed data on various legal mechanisms has until recently been lacking. Using new data collected over a 3-year period in coordination with the Oxford-Minnesota Transitional Justice Collaborative (OMTJC), in addition to other longitudinal data from a variety of sources, I address this data deficit in my research. Second, to see the positive impact of human rights legal action on democracy and peace, one must zoom out and observe change over the long term. This dissertation is the first to give serious consideration to issues of time and process in the study of human rights law. In its wide sweep, the dissertation also provides new evidence of robust links between social movements and pursuit of rights-based legalization; between `transitional justice' and the long-term decline of repression; and between enforcement of human rights law and the non-recurrence of civil war. Overall, I find reason to be skeptical of human rights critics, who base their arguments about consequences on short-term events, rather than analyzing larger processes of social transformation.