Human Rights, Responsibilities, and Democracy, Comments on Tasioulas and Moyn Papers: Symposium on the Future of International Human Rights Law

It is a pleasure and a challenge to comment on these two very different Articles, Saving Human Rights from Human Rights Law, by John Tasioulas, and \u27On Human Rights and Majority Politics: Felix Frankfurter\u27s Democratic Theory, by Samuel Moyn. Both are rich, complex, and thought-provoking. To the degree they share any common dimension, it would be their skepticism toward human rights law, and in particular toward the judicialization of human rights law. But the skepticism comes from quite different directions and from their different disciplines. In the case of Tasioulas\u27s paper, the skepticism derives from his belief that legal human rights have gone beyond the realm of moral human rights, and thus he critiques unjustified legalization and judicialization of human rights. Moyn focuses on US constitutional law to argue that courts should exercise more deference with regard to the laws and policies decided upon by democratic majorities. In Tasioulas\u27s case, human rights law is contrasted with morality and found wanting, and in Moyn\u27s case, human rights law is contrasted with democracy and found wanting

The socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: Introduction

Thomas Risse y Kathryn Sikkink plantean en este texto la importancia del impacto de las normas internacionales en las políticas domésticas y proponen un “modelo en espiral” en cinco fases para comprender los cambios en la interiorización de los derechos humanos como norma por parte de los estados. Desarrollan una teoría que explica las etapas y los mecanismos a través de los cuales las normas internacionales generan cambios en el comportamiento de los actores internacionales y transnacionales, y que ayuda a comprender mejor el impacto general de las normas en la política internacional. Este proceso mediante el cual las normas internacionales son interiorizadas e implementadas domésticamente puede ser entendido según los autores como un proceso de socializaciónIn this article Thomas Risse y Kathryn Sikkink analyze the importance of international norms impact over domestic politics and propose a five phases “spiral model” to explain the changes in human rights internalization by the states. They develop a theoretical framework that explains the stages and mechanisms by which international norms promote changes in international and transnational actors behavior, and that serves to a better comprehension of the general norms impact over international politics. The process by which international norms are internalized and implented on the domestic level can be understood, according to the authors, as a socialization proces

Evaluating Transitional Justice: The Role of Multi-Level Mixed Methods Datasets and the Colombia Reparation Program for War Victims

This paper examines the role of mixed and multi-level methods datasets used to inform evaluations of transitional justice mechanisms. The Colombia reparation program for victims of war is used to illustrate how a convergent design involving multiple datasets can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a complex transitional justice mechanism. This was achieved through a unique combination of (1) macro-level analysis enabled by a global dataset of transitional justice mechanisms, in this case the reparations data gathered by the Transitional Justice Research Collaborative, (2) meso-level data gathered at the organizational level on the Unidad para las Victimas (Victims Unit), the organization in charge of implementing the reparations program and overseeing the domestic database of victims registered in the reparations program, and (3) micro-level population- based perception datasets on the Colombian reparations program collected in the Peacebuilding Data database. The methods used to define measures, access existing data, and assemble new datasets are discussed, as are some of the challenges faced by the inter-disciplinary team. The results illustrate how the use of global, domestic, and micro- level datasets together yields high quality data, with multiple perspectives permitting the use of innovative evaluation methods and the development of important findings and recommendations for transitional justice mechanisms

Dinâmicas de Norma Internacional e mudança política

Preocupações normativas e ideacionais sempre permearam o estudo da política internacional, e são uma linha consistente na revista International Organization. Quando a IO foi fundada, as visões realistas dominantes da política, embora rejeitassem o idealismo, estavam muito preocupadas com questões relativas a legitimidade e ideologia. O início da Guerra Fria, afinal de contas, não era simplesmente um conflito de posições entre grandes potências anônimas: era uma guerra por "corações e mentes". A combinação de poder e um “propósito social legítimo" era central para a política externa norte-americana desse período.  Ao mesmo tempo, os pesquisadores de relações internacionais estavam estudando dois dos maiores projetos de construção social do período: a integração europeia e a descolonização. Os neofuncionalistas, assim como os realistas, estavam conscientemente tentando se afastar dos predecessores “idealistas” (nesse caso, David Mitrany e seus colegas), mas a rede complexa de tarefas técnicas que eles delinearam almejava mais do que promover bem-estar material: visava, em última instância, fins ideacionais e sociais. O efeito spillover deveria fazer mais do que criar tarefas técnicas adicionais; ele deveria mudar atitudes, identidades e afetos entre os participantes. Da mesma forma, os estudiosos reconheciam que a descolonização foi impulsionada por uma agenda profundamente normativa, a qual explicitamente procurou reconstituir as identidades tanto dos novos Estados e de seus antigos colonizadores, como as relações entre eles

Diasporas and secessionist conflicts : the mobilization of the Armenian, Albanian and Chechen diasporas

This article examines the impact of diasporas on secessionist conflicts, focusing on the Albanian, Armenian and Chechen diasporas and the conflicts in Kosovo, Karabakh and Chechnya during the 1990s. How do diasporas radicalize these conflicts? I argue that despite differences in diaspora communal characteristics and the types of the secessionist conflicts, a common pattern of mobilization develops. Large-scale diasporic support for secessionism emerges only after independence is proclaimed by the local elites. From that point onwards diasporas become engaged in a conflict spiral, and transnational coalitions are formed between local secessionist and diaspora groups. Depending on the organizational strength of the local strategic centre and the diasporic institutions, these coalitions endure or dissipate. Diasporas exert radicalization influences on the conflict spiral on two specific junctures – when grave violations of human rights occur in the homeland and when local moderate elites start losing credibility that they can achieve the secessionist goal

Explaining disappearances as a tool of political terror

Despite the widespread use of disappearances as a central tool of terror in recent decades, little is known about the emergence of the phenomenon or its underlying rationale. We argue that growing international accountability norms, coupled with the improved quality of reporting human rights abuses, paradoxically reshaped the repressive strategies of certain regimes and pushed them to deploy more clandestine and extrajudicial forms of repression, predominantly disappearances. We also explore the timing of disappearances: when a state decides to deploy a particular instrument of terror can greatly benefit our understanding of why it was used. We show that repressive regimes tend to use disappearances in the first period after a coup, taking advantage of the general confusion and opacity to secure strategic benefits and protect the regime from external scrutiny and future accountability. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on human rights and political repression by highlighting an ‘unintended consequence’ of international accountability norms: repressive regimes turn to clandestine crimes