Browsing by Subject "Transitional justice"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Dealing with communist legacies: the politics ofl lustration in Eastern Europe
    (2014-01) Moltz, Ryan
    Many of the post-Communist states of Eastern Europe have chosen to enact a vetting procedure known as lustration to ban former secret police agents and their informants from holding public office. This practice is part of a global trend toward increasing accountability for human rights violations. In this dissertation, lustration policies are examined within this context. First, an original dataset covering all post-Communist states in Europe and the former Soviet Union for the period 1989 to 2012 is used to analyze competing explanations for the proposal and enactment of lustration laws. Discrete-time logistic regression shows that democratization and control of the government by Left parties are strong predictors of lustration. Second, the extended case method is applied to the case of lustration to resolve a theoretical paradox. World polity neoinstitutionalist theory would predict that lustration should not be occurring. Drawing on insights and concepts from other areas within sociology, the paradox is resolved and a revised theoretical framework is proposed. Third, the cases of Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia are examined using the strategic narrative method of historical sociology. The cases were chosen because of their varied outcomes with lustration--no law in Croatia, a law without enforcement in Serbia, and a law with enforcement in Macedonia. Analyses of these cases show both the power and the limits of path-dependent explanations in historical sociology. Finally, the implications of lustration for democratization and transitional justice are discussed.
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    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.
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    Seeking justice during war: accountability in conflicted democracies.
    (2012-08) Lynch, Moira Katherine
    In the past several years, the transitional justice literature has generated theories concerning varying human rights accountability outcomes in states transitioning from authoritarianism and violent conflict. Most of these theories are based on transition and post-conflict dynamics. However, a subset of these cases, democracies that have experienced internal conflict, cannot accurately be explained by these theories. Human rights trials and truth-seeking measures are overwhelmingly conducted during the violence in conflicted democracies, thus it is not appropriate to theorize accountability outcomes in these cases based on transition or post-conflict dynamics. Yet, these cases continue to be included in large N datasets and research that formulates explanations on why some countries implement accountability mechanisms while others do not. I assert that it is necessary to consider these cases in a different light. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Spain, I argue that the causal mechanisms that shaped prosecutions and truth-seeking measures in these cases were rooted in the pre-conflict milieu. Vertical, horizontal and external relations of accountability, including political competition, civil society pressure, judicial independence and pressure from international institutions, prompted accountability mechanisms in all three countries. The variation across the cases in terms of the prosecution record and the use of truth-seeking measures is explained by the extent to which these relations of accountability were available and operating efficiently prior to the conflict. The efficiency of these relations, in turn, was shaped by the presence/absence of entrenched emergency laws.