Human rights are claims that all human beings have to the protection of fundamental human needs, interests, and freedoms. Debates about human rights consider whether such rights exist, and if they do, whether they are necessarily institutional norms codifiable in law and correlated with government duties or are instead preinstitutional or natural in some sense. Debates about human rights focus on the moral and practical grounds for such rights, the subjects of human rights, the types of human rights—civil, political, social, material, collective—and the precise lists of rights that fall within these broad, overlapping types. Debates also address objections against human rights as a conceptual, normative, and practical framework. Objections focus on issues such as ethnocentricity, cultural imperialism, forfeitability, individualism, claimability, and an adversarial ethos, among others.
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Human Rights
Kimberley Brownlee and Rowan Cruft
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Russia’s Arctic Ambitions
Robert Orttung
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the Arctic a priority since taking power in 2000. He sees developing Arctic oil and natural gas resources as a key driver of Russia’s economy, the Northern Sea Route as shaping Russia’s geostrategic future, and an increased military presence as an indicator of Russia’s great-power status. Considering whether Russia will be able to realize these ambitions opens up a wide range of research questions that continue to be hotly debated more than a year after Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia’s authoritarian government has quashed independent movements among all parts of its population, and the Arctic’s Indigenous population is no exception. How these various groups can express their interests within a closed political system and what Indigeneity means in the Russian Arctic context animate work in this area. Energy is also a central theme for Russia because the country depends heavily on fossil fuel exports to power its economy and maintain standards of living. How will Russia adapt as the world moves slowly, but inexorably, away from its current reliance on fossil fuels and seeks greener forms of energy? Will Russia’s Arctic have a role to play in the new economy, or will it simply rely on state subsidies and an expanded military presence? As the global economy continues to shift, climate change and outside forces will have a growing impact on the Russian north. The Kremlin sees the Northern Sea Route as a vital link for East–West trade, but political, economic, and environmental uncertainties suggest there is little hope that the route will ever come near serving as a replacement for the Suez Canal. Similarly, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the escalating violence in both countries has ratcheted up the ongoing militarization of the Arctic and split the region into two competing blocs: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) versus Russia. In these conditions, what is the future for international diplomacy, the Arctic’s record for cooperation, and regional institutions like the Arctic Council? Having lost access to some Western technology and markets because of sanctions, the Russian north no longer benefits from its ability to balance between East and West, and it is growing more reliant on China. To what extent do the interests of these two countries coincide? While China may appreciate having Russia as a partner in countering the West, it has its own global ambitions, and cleaving too close to a chaotic and faltering Russia could limit what it can achieve. Overall, as the Putinist state looks increasingly distracted by the war effort, and as the global context around the Russian Arctic transforms, the future of Russia’s north is uncertain at best.
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The Politics of Prosecuting Genocide and War Crimes in Asia
John Ciorciari
Delivering justice for genocide, war crimes, and other mass atrocities inevitably presents steep political challenges. That has certainly been true in Asia, where relatively few such international crimes have been prosecuted. Many Japanese were tried for war crimes following the Second World War, but for decades thereafter, the region saw only a few ill-fated efforts to advance justice for mass crimes. Some political space for accountability opened after the Cold War, enabling the creation of tribunals in Timor-Leste, Cambodia, and Bangladesh to address some of the many instances of impunity in Asia. Some observers have welcomed these trials as important efforts to advance accountability in a region rife with impunity. Still, the design and performance of these tribunals have reflected the difficulty of subjecting politically empowered or protected actors to justice. In each instance, trials have focused on suspects defeated at the ballot box or on the battlefield, prompting charges of victor’s justice. In other cases, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, even mounting an accountability process has proven a formidable challenge. In a region where Westphalian sovereignty and the norm of noninterference are strong, the will of incumbent domestic authorities remains the political linchpin for accountability efforts. In Asia as elsewhere, prosecuting international crimes requires exploiting windows of political possibility, although typically at the cost of accepting highly selective justice.
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Legal Repression in Russia
Katerina Tertytchnaya and Madeleine Tiratsoo
Contemporary authoritarian regimes use the law in order to stifle their rivals’ ability and willingness to challenge the state. Research has investigated the conditions that make legal repression more likely in electoral autocracies and advanced our understanding of the ways in which legislation may be used for repressive ends in these settings. To a lesser extent, studies have also explored the consequences of legal repression in nondemocracies, focusing on its impact on dissent, opposition leaders, protesters, and civil society.
This article discusses how, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the law has been used to exercise political power vis-à-vis the opposition. Since the early 2000s, the Russian authorities have used legislative channels to adopt and refine laws and regulations aimed at hindering protest and inhibiting the development of an independent civil society. The discussion of the Russian case contributes to comparative research on legal repression and authoritarian politics in various ways. First, it offers important insights into the direct and indirect consequences of legal repression on dissent, the development of civil society, and public opinion toward groups targeted by legal repression. Second, the study of Russia illustrates how institutional capture and power consolidation facilitate the adoption and implementation of repressive legislation. Finally, the Russian case advances our understanding of the dynamic nature of legal repression. Reforms to laws regulating protest and civil society in Russia showcase how domestic and external events may cause legal repression to escalate. The article concludes by identifying fruitful avenues for future research on legal repression.
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Key Actors in the Management of Crises: International and Regional Organizations
Eva-Karin Gardell and Bertjan Verbeek
In crisis-ridden times, when events like the COVID-19 pandemic, acts of terrorism, and climate change-induced crises are making constant headlines, states, businesses, and individuals alike look to international organizations (IOs) to help them weather the storm. How can the role of IOs be better understood in the context of crisis and crisis management? For a start, it requires a distinction between objective and subjective crisis perspectives in studying IOs. From an objective perspective, IOs are examined as unitary actors that have the aim of contributing to the stability of the international political system. On the other hand, in a subjectivistic approach, IOs’ actual crisis management is the focus. In this perspective, the emphasis is on an IO’s internal life, that is, its perceptions, bureau politics, and decision-making. In the exploration of these issues, IOs can no longer by studied as entities but have to be unwrapped into small groups and individuals, such as members of secretariats or member state’s top politicians. As borne out by theories developed by scholars of crisis management and foreign-policy analysis, centralization and cognitive bias are of special interest in the study of IOs. IOs’ crisis management has four crisis phases and tasks: sense-making, decision-making, meaning-making, and crisis termination. Finally, crises may prove a threat to, or an opportunity for, IOs. Transnational crises may usher in IOs’ foundation and flourishing, or they may contribute to IOs’ demise.
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Civilian Coup Advocacy
Drew Holland Kinney
Available scholarship on civil–military relations, and coup politics in particular, tends to treat military coups d’état as originating purely within the minds of military officers; that is, the overwhelming bulk of scholarship assumes that the idea to seize power stems from officer cliques. To the extent that societal factors (e.g., polarization, economic decline, party factionalism) explain coups, they merely account for why officers decide to seize power. Most research that discusses civilian support for coups does so within single case studies—almost entirely drawn from the Middle East and North Africa. Building on a vibrant wave of studies that disaggregates civil–military institutions, a small body of recent research has begun to systematically and comprehensively consider the theoretical and empirical importance of civilian involvement in military coups. This perspective deemphasizes the military’s possession of weapons and instead focuses on ideational sources of power. Civilians have more power and resources to offer military plotters than existing scholarship has given them credit for. Civilian elites and publics can legitimate coups, organize them, manipulate information on behalf of the plotters, and finance coups for their own economic interests. In short, to fully understand coups, one must seek as much knowledge as possible about their formation, including where the idea for each plot originated. Such detailed analysis of coup plots will give researchers a clearer picture about the motivating factors behind coups.
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Political Parties and Democratization
John Ishiyama
Parties are indispensable to the building and maintenance of democracy. This is because parties are purported to promote representation, conflict management, integration, and accountability in new democracies. Second, the failures of parties in helping to build democracy in systems in transition are because they have not performed these functions very well. Third, there are three emerging research agendas to be explored that address the relationship between parties and democratic consolidation: (a) the promotion of institutional innovations that help build institutionalized party systems; (b) the role of ethnic parties in democratization and democratic consolidation; and (c) the role of rebel parties in building peace and democracy after civil wars. Although not entirely exhaustive, these three agendas represent promising avenues of research into the role political parties play in democratization.
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Guinea: The History of the Military as a Political Actor
Paul Clarke
The Guinean military was deeply intertwined with political power for the first 50 years after dependence in 1958. Under its founding president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, who led Guinea as a one-party state from 1958 to 1984, it was built with support from the Warsaw Pact and became a small, competent force which supported national development and regional peacekeeping. While Touré politicized the army, it was not an important political actor, and in the end it fell victim to Touré’s brutality. Colonel Lansana Conté seized power after Touré, leading a military dictatorship that fully controlled the government and succumbed to factionalism, corruption, and indiscipline. Conté died in 2008, and within a year, the successor regime had slipped into so much brutality that the military leaders accepted transition to civilian rule, making Guinea a fledging multiparty democracy since 2010, while the military returned to the barracks.
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Military Coups d’État and Their Causes
Fabrice Lehoucq
There have been three waves of scholarship on military coups d’état (or simply “coups”)—the unconstitutional replacement of chief executives by military officers—since the 1960s. The first used case studies to explore why the military overthrows governments. One of its central findings was that military uprisings were an integral part of political succession in many countries. A second wave produced the “aggregate studies” that were the first to deploy cross-national databases to identify the measurable features that distinguished more from less coup-prone political systems. These studies revealed, among other things, that coups proliferated in places with a history of instability. The third and current wave of scholarship takes advantage of the development of statistical software for limited dependent variables—then unavailable, now commonplace—to recast the quantitative research on coups.
Two core findings have survived disconfirmation since the start of the third wave. First, higher income countries have fewer coups, though the effects are small (and become even weaker when models only contain developing countries). Second, “political legacy effects” mean that the probability of a coup declines with time since the last military uprising. Much of the latest wave of research pinpoints factors—like coup proofing, less inequality, or the end of the Cold War—that reduce the probability of a coup. The development of ever more sophisticated statistical techniques to divine the causes of instability, nevertheless, relies on off-the-shelf data sets and coup catalogs whose validity—properly understood as accuracy—is questionable. Only a greater attention to accuracy and complementary methods promise to produce a comprehensive account of why the military topples governments in some, but not in other, places.
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Crisis Mapping and Crowdsourcing in Complex Emergencies
Jen Ziemke, Buddhika Jayamaha, and Molly M. Jahn
Crisis mappers secure satellite imagery, photos, video, event data, incident data, and other documentary evidence to create an operational picture of a disaster in order to facilitate improved humanitarian response and assistance in a crisis.
The era of human-powered crisis mapping between 2009 and 2014 was a bootstrapped effort very much a function of the peculiar state of technological development at the time—available but not yet formalized, streamlined, and automated. Humans filled the gap until machine assistance could catch up. These efforts, often mundane (e.g., cut and paste over and over for hours), were more reflective of the state of technology at the time than anything else.
Another precondition that enabled the field to grow is the often taken-for-granted public good provided by the GPS satellites maintained by the U.S. Air Force. Without this service, the project at the time would not have emerged where and when it did.
The future will be shaped as a result of improvements in automated forms of data collection; improved machine learning techniques to help filter, identify, visualize, and analyze the data; and the proliferation of low-cost drones and other forms of sensors, to name a few.
