The literature on economic sanctions has long studied sender countries’ policymaking as a simple choice between imposing sanctions to extract concessions from the targeted country and doing nothing. We depart from this simplifying assumption and analyze sanctions as a multifaceted foreign...

Although individual citizens perceive the human rights conditions in their country differently, existing research on human rights and public opinion has tended to ignore the possible impact from international sources of information. This article builds upon previous research on human rights,...

Why do governments abuse human rights, and what can be done to deter and reverse abusive practices? This article examines the emerging social science on these two questions. Over the last few decades, scholars have made considerable progress in answering the first one. Abuse stems, centrally,...

Transnational advocacy organizations are influential actors in the international politics of human rights. While political scientists have described several methods these groups use – particularly a set of strategies termed ‘information politics’ – scholars have yet to...

Why does the discovery of oil lead to increased government repression in some countries and not others? Why is there variance in the extent to which democracy constrains state violations of human rights? We assume that an executive’s propensity to use violence against citizens is a...

It is commonly believed that torture is an effective tool for combating an insurgent threat. Yet while torture is practiced in nearly all counterinsurgency campaigns, the evidence documenting torture’s effects remains severely limited. This study provides the first micro-level statistical...

Empirical analyses of domestic legal traditions in the social science literature demonstrate that common law states have better economic freedoms, stronger investor protection, more developed capital markets, and better property rights protection than states with civil law, Islamic law, or mixed...

Established in 1964, the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) celebrates 50 years. This anniversary special issue of the journal offers broad reviews of research areas that have been central both to the journal and to the field of peace and conflict research generally. An opening article co-authored...

The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use...

The purpose of this study is to identify and explain recent US human rights policy in the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs). Foreign aid, whether distributed directly (bilateral aid) or indirectly through multilateral institutions such as the MDBs, is one of several tools through which the...