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Human Rights Violations, Weak States, and Civil War

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Abstract

This study examines the role of human rights violations as a harbinger of civil wars to come, as well as the links between repression, state weakness, and conflict. Human rights violations are both part of the escalating process that may end in civil war and can contribute to an escalation of conflict to civil war, particularly in weak states. The role of government repression and state weakness in leading to civil war is tested empirically. The results show that both closely correlate with civil war onset, especially if they are observed in combination. A two-stage model shows that, while low-level conflict leads to human rights violations, they increase the risk of an escalation to civil war in turn. Human rights violations are identified as an important aspect of understanding civil war onset as the result of an escalation over time and a clear early warning sign of wars to come.

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Notes

  1. In the remainder, I will use the terms indiscriminate repression, human rights violations, and violations of personal integrity rights interchangeably.

  2. With one exception: population size was not significant with Regan’s (1996) list of civil conflicts.

  3. See the detailed case descriptions available at http://www.yale.edu/unsy/jcr/jcrdatadec04.htm, accessed March 2005.

  4. Robustness tests with a number of alternative civil war measures (Sarkees et al. 2001; Gleditsch et al. 2001; Fearon and Laitin 2003a; Regan 1996; Doyle and Sambanis 2000) show roughly similar results.

  5. The coding scheme is available at www.politicalterrorscale.org, accessed July 2009.

  6. The Polity2 variable is centered on ‘0,’ implying that such a country is an anocracy. The size and interpretation of coefficients and odds-ratios are not affected by the decision to reverse the anocracy variable.

  7. http://pwt.econ.upenn.edu, accessed October 2004.

  8. The independent variables in the model do not show strong signs of multicollinearity.

  9. The Polity2 scale is not centered because the mean (−0.031) is very close to zero.

  10. By adding a variable that assumes a value of 0 if PTS = 3, 1 if PTS = 2 or 4, and 2 if PTS = 1 or 5.

  11. The level of democracy also has a positive coefficient in Fearon and Laitin (2003a) model 1 but is not statistically significant.

  12. However, even with regard to interstate war, Mansfield and Snyder (2002) report findings that incomplete transitions toward democracy increase the probability of war.

  13. One might argue that this effect should empirically be tested by using interaction terms. Yet, interaction terms between repression and economic development and, alternatively, repression and democracy, were not significant (results not shown).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and Management, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Nicolas Rost

  2. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for Somalia, OCHA-Somalia, PO Box 28832, Nairobi, 00200, Kenya

    Nicolas Rost

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Correspondence to Nicolas Rost.

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I would like to thank the late Steve Poe, David Mason, Michael Greig, Susumu Shikano, the editor and anonymous reviewers at Human Rights Review, Emily Clough, Nico Petrovsky, Sabine Carey, and Jim Battista for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this paper are those of the author and do not represent the views of the United Nations or of OCHA.

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Rost, N. Human Rights Violations, Weak States, and Civil War. Hum Rights Rev 12, 417–440 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-011-0196-9

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