| NSF Org: |
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 19, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 25, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1627101 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Brian Humes
SES Division of Social and Economic Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | October 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $161,352.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $161,352.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2017 = $81,405.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
310 E CAMPUS RD RM 409 ATHENS GA US 30602-1589 (706)542-5939 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
310 E. Campus Rd. Athens GA US 30602-1589 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Political Science, LSS-Law And Social Sciences |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): | |
| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
General Summary
Why do we observe different levels of respect for human rights in different regions of the same country? Furthermore, why are citizens? human rights generally uniformly protected (or abused) within the borders of some countries while within other countries these rights are generally upheld in some locations and severely restricted in others? Prior research investigating patterns of human rights protection and violation has typically treated states as centralized decision-makers and examined state respect for human rights as a single, countrywide phenomenon. This approach masks important variations in the actors perpetrating abuses, motives for the abuse, targets of the abuse, and severity of abuse. The PIs propose that cross-national human rights researchers must break their focus on the country as the unit of analysis and look at the sub-national characteristics of repressive behaviors. The PIs focus on three major factors: 1) antigovernment activity, 2) government decentralization, and 3) local government capacity. They argue that antigovernment dissent encourages government agents to respond with high levels of repression. However, this response is particularly likely when government power is highly decentralized, when the dissent takes place far from the national capital, and when the local government is largely incapable of controlling its repressive agents. The PIs collect the first dataset to document the level of repression at the subnational level for a global sample of countries. These data are likely to be used by government agencies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and others to engage in evidence-based policy and advocacy.
Technical Summary
While levels of state repression and the frequency, severity, and targets of human rights abuses vary spatially within states, most previous studies of these topics have only considered repression in the aggregate. This is problematic because it ignores variation in institutional structures and decision-making processes within countries. The PIs explain this subnational variation of repression within states. In particular, they focus on three major factors: antigovernment activity, government decentralization, and local state capacity. They develop a global dataset that captures violations of physical integrity rights by state agents at the level of the sub-national unit. For this project, the PIs rely on a mix of expert coding, theoretically informed measurement models, and computational techniques, which are capable of coding and then linking together the diverse information drawn from a set of primary source documents. Using this information, they generate standards-based measures for each of several specific types of physical integrity violations (arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial execution) as well as a combined indicator for these abuses for each first-order subnational administrative unit within a state. This level of analysis brings scholarship closer to the level at which most citizens encounter the government's legal, political, and bureaucratic authority.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
At the University of Georgia, approximately 140 undergraduate and graduate students participated in the collection of, and extraction of data from, more than 40,000 allegations concerning physical integrity rights abuse from a selection of US State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch annual human rights reports covering the time period from 1999 through 2016. These allegations were then used to generate an automated process that extracted more than 1.6 million possible allegations concerning physical integrity rights abuse from these same reports over the same time period. Finally, supervised machine learning models were used to estimate the probability that each of these allegations actually contained information concerning abuses like disappearance, torture, political imprisonment, and extrajudicial killing. Using these probabilities, we created a dataset of 388,864 unique abuse allegations in 196 countries between 1999 and 2016. This is a new data set of physical integrity rights allegations that has never before existed and should drive the study of human rights forward for years to come.
At the time of this report in November 2019, work on this award has been completed at the University of Georgia. However, the other awards associated with this collaborative research (#1626775 and #1627464) are ongoing. As such, the final results of this collaborative project are still forthcoming.
Last Modified: 11/27/2019
Modified by: K. Chad Clay
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