Did 9/11 Change Everything? Security and Human Rights Trade-offs in International Cooperation

Under what conditions are states more likely to trade-off human rights when cooperating on sensitive areas of international security? We now know that during the post-9/11 period, a number of countries have cooperated with the United States of America on a range of controversial security matters. The clandestine nature of counterterrorism cooperation makes it difficult to study the causes and dynamics of trading off security and human rights in international politics directly. However, one example of these post-9/11 practices (extraordinary rendition) has the advantage of being observable (ex-post), as we can analyse detainee testimony and suspected extraordinary rendition flight paths using publicly available data. This thesis capitalizes on an opportunity to provide theoretically driven and empirically testable answers to questions on the causes and consequences of contentious forms of international security cooperation. What influenced more than a quarter of the world’s countries to participate in rendition, secret detention and interrogation operations during the post-9/11 period? What explains the variation in the political costs of participation in the post-9/11 Central Intelligence Agency extraordinary rendition, secret detention and interrogation programme? This dissertation focuses on the tension between common and conflicting interests among states and between parties and voters to answer these questions. This thesis provides a substantive contribution to international relations literature by suggesting both which countries are more likely to tradeoff human rights and cooperate with one another on contentious security issues and which domestic environments are most likely to generate the greatest political costs for getting caught. The main findings from this thesis have important policy implications and provide academics and advocacy researchers with new tools for detecting human rights violations and holding states to account where previous efforts have failed due to a lack of evidence

Disease and Dissent: Epidemics as a Catalyst for Social Unrest

We identify a set of potential theoretical mechanisms that link the outbreak and spread of communicable diseases to temporal and spatial patterns of social unrest. Despite the proliferation of research since 2020 analyzing the social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we examine the broader relationship between less severe epidemic outbreaks and their social consequences. Epidemics, as well as the policies that governments implement to tackle them, often generate acute grievances among the public and create new opportunities for collective dissent, the combination of which promotes unrest. Nonetheless, perceived opportunities for unrest are influenced by the scale and scope of the disease outbreak, and particularly lethal disease outbreaks may therefore offset the incentives for collective mobilization. We examine these relationships using sub-national data on communicable disease outbreaks and geo-located social unrest events data in 60 African and Latin American countries from 1990 to 2017 and find support for our argument. However, we observe a curvilinear relationships between the severity of the epidemic and the incidence of unrest

Judiciary institutions and violent crime in American Indian nations

In many American Indian nations the security situation is dire. While scholars have studied how institutions shape economic development in American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) nations, the role of AIAN institutions for security and violent crime has received much less attention—despite the extensive literature highlighting the important role of effective and legitimate institutions in the long-term decline of violence. We analyze how varying types of American Indian polities and judiciary institutions fare in tackling violent crime using data across 146 American Indian polities. Our findings indicate that more autonomous American Indian criminal justice institutions with specialized court systems are associated with lower violent crime. However, customary justice institutions do not appear to be effective in reducing violent crime, highlighting the problem of cultural mismatch between traditional and formal justice systems. We argue that analyzing AIAN nations provides important insights into how institutional legitimacy can shape violent crime

Measuring Institutional Variation Across American Indian Constitutions Using Automated Content Analysis

How can variation in institutions over time and across jurisdictions be measured effectively? This is an issue of great importance to scholars studying how institutional characteristics shape political, social and economic issues such as development and the rule of law. We present a new dataset of American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) constitutions and a new approach to measure variation in polities across AIAN nations. Studying AIAN polities can provide insights into how institutions – in AIAN nations and more generally – shape local policy outcomes. Existing data on AIAN institutions have largely been based on costly and time-consuming expert coding and survey approaches, where the end product will become obsolete once institutions change. We implement a text-as-data approach using machine learning techniques to compare institutional designs across AIAN nations, studying in particular the variation of judicial institutions, which have previously been shown to play a crucial role in AIAN development. We present results for a sample of 97 American Indian constitutions and compare our machine coded measures against previous attempts to systematically code AIAN institutions. We show that machine coding replicates expert coded data. Our automated content analysis of the full texts of constitutional documents allows for more flexible and customizable measurement of the variation of institutions in AIAN communities, while using a larger corpus of data than existing approaches limited by costs related to data collection and coding. Our approach can also easily be extended to compare other topics, such as the executive, and shows the potential of automated measures to complement or confirm more traditional coding of political institutions

Going global: The introduction of the Asian isopod Ianiropsis serricaudis Gurjanova (Crustacea: Peracarida) to North America and Europe

The Asian isopod Ianiropsis serricaudis is now well established in fouling communities, often associated with introduced ascidians, throughout the Northern Hemisphere but has gone largely unnoticed because of its diminutive size (typically less than 3 mm in length) and the difficulties of identifying small peracarid crustaceans. Known locations include the northeastern Pacific (Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, and Monterey Bay), the northwestern Atlantic (from the Gulf of Maine to Barnegat Bay, NJ), and the northeastern Atlantic (England and the Netherlands). We predict that this species is widespread along North America and European coasts, and may already be introduced to cold temperate waters of the Southern Hemisphere as well

Ethanol Pharmacokinetics in Neonates Secondary to Medication Administration

Purpose: Ethanol serves as a solvent and microbial preservative in oral liquid medications and is the second most commonly used solvent in liquid medications following water. Despite widespread use of ethanol in liquid medications for neonates, the pharmacokinetics and toxicity of ethanol in young children are not well described. The aim of the current study is to quantify blood ethanol levels in neonates secondary to oral ethanol containing medications. Methods: Neonates who received either oral phenobarbital (15% ethanol) and/or oral dexamethasone (30% ethanol) per standard of care were eligible for enrollment. A maximum of 6 blood samples per patient (4.5 mL total) were taken over the study period. Blood samples were collected via heel stick at the time of clinical laboratory collections or following a specific collection for study purposes. In addition, blood samples were collected from neonates receiving sublingual buprenorphine (30% ethanol) for neonatal abstinence syndrome from a separate clinical study. Blood ethanol levels were measured using a validated headspace gas chromatography-mass spectrometry method utilizing micro-volume ( ̴100uL) plasma samples. The limit of detection and lower limit of quantification for the assay were 0.1 mg/L and 0.5 mg/L respectively. Results: A total of 39 plasma samples from 15 neonates who were on ethanol containing medications were collected over the study period. Four neonates were exposed to phenobarbital and/or dexamethasone, while eleven neonates were exposed to buprenorphine alone or in combination with phenobarbital. Patients were exposed to an average of 71.6 mg/kg (range 13.1 to 215 mg/kg) of ethanol after a single dose of an ethanol containing medication. Blood ethanol levels were detectable in 98% (38/39) of samples, quantifiable in 67% (26/39) of samples, and ranged from below detection to 85.4 mg/L. Ethanol was rapidly cleared and did not accumulate with current dosing regimens. Conclusion: Ethanol intake secondary to medication administration varied widely. Blood ethanol levels in neonates were low and ethanol was eliminated rapidly after a single dose of oral medications that contained a sizable fraction of ethanol.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/petposters/1000/thumbnail.jp

Transcriptional regulation of PNPLA3 and its impact on susceptibility to nonalcoholic fatty liver Disease (NAFLD) in humans

The increased expression of PNPLA3148M leads to hepatosteatosis in mice. This study aims to investigate the genetic control of hepatic PNPLA3 transcription and to explore its impact on NAFLD risk in humans. Through a locus-wide expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) mapping in two human liver sample sets, a PNPLA3 intronic SNP, rs139051 A>G was identified as a significant eQTL (p = 6.6×10-8) influencing PNPLA3 transcription, with the A allele significantly associated with increased PNPLA3 mRNA. An electrophoresis mobility shift assay further demonstrated that the A allele has enhanced affinity to nuclear proteins than the G allele. The impact of this eQTL on NAFLD risk was further tested in three independent populations. We found that rs139051 did not independently affect the NAFLD risk, whilst rs738409 did not significantly modulate PNPLA3 transcription but was associated with NAFLD risk. The A-G haplotype associated with higher transcription of the disease-risk rs738409 G allele conferred similar risk for NAFLD compared to the G-G haplotype that possesses a lower transcription level. Our study suggests that the pathogenic role of PNPLA3148M in NAFLD is independent of the gene transcription in humans, which may be attributed to the high endogenous transcription level of PNPLA3 gene in human livers