Weak states, human rights violations, and the outbreak of civil war.

In recent years, explanations for the occurrence of civil war have mainly emphasized state weakness as providing an opportunity for greed-based rebellions. Yet, this explanation leaves many questions open, as it cannot distinguish between weak states that do and those that do not experience civil war. In this paper, I argue that abuses of personal integrity rights, committed or sponsored by the government, provide this missing link. The theory is illustrated and formalized in a game-theoretic model and then tested empirically, building on earlier work by Fearon and Laitin (2003a) and Sambanis (2004). The results show that repression is highly significant in both statistical and substantive terms. According to one model, the probability of civil war onset increases by a factor of almost 16 in highly repressive countries compared to countries with no repression. Further robustness tests across alternative civil war lists largely confirm the importance of human rights abuses in explaining the occurrence of civil war.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of North Texas

Year dc:date

2005

Author dc:creator

• Rost, Nicolas

Contributors dc:contributor

• Poe, Steven
• Mason, T. David
• Greig, Michael

• Civil war.
• Human rights.
• repression
• civil war onset
• human rights
• violations
• state weakness
• game theory

Statement dc:rights

• Public
• Copyright
• Rost, Nicolas
• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

oclc: 62153191
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4748/
ark: ark:/67531/metadc4748

OAI identifier oai:identifier

info:ark/67531/metadc4748