External threat and human rights: How international conflict leads to domestic repression

Abstract

When does interstate conflict lead to repression in warring countries? A long-held maxim in human rights literature is that governments repress when they feel threatened. International conflict would seem to threaten governments, yet recent literature has either ignored interstate conflict or found that international conflict has no effect in respect to human rights. In this article I examine how interstate conflict leads to domestic human rights violations by governments. Governments often attempt to increase their hold on political power by violating human rights when faced with external threats. Using a measure that incorporates information about the tangible costs of fighting, the location of conflicts, and the probability of defeat, I find that threatening international conflict has an immediate deleterious effect with respect to physical integrity rights and some civil rights.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ryan Whittingham, Shelby Hall, Greg Corning, Naomi Levy, Anne Baker, and Ryan Tans for their valuable comments in revising this article.

Notes

1 For exceptions, see Wright (2014) on territorial revision and repression of physical integrity rights and Uzonyi (2018) on interstate rivalry and mass killings.

2 See work by Rooney (2019) that analyzed how loose state of emergency power rules pave the way for international conflict in the first place.

3 For a contemporary exploration of how leaders divert attention from problems by attempting to scapegoat domestic minorities, see Martinez Machain and Rosenberg (2018).

4 The start date is driven by CIRI year coverage; the end date is driven by data availability on the location of militarized disputes.

5 Robustness tests using dependent variables from the Varieties of Democracy project (Coppedge, Gerring, Henrik Knutsen, Lindberg, Teorell, et al. 2020), PTS (Gibney, Cornett, Wood, Arnon, and Pisano 2018), and Schnakenberg and Fariss’s latent measure of respect for human rights have provided further support for my claim that international conflict is related to repression.

6 Indeed, the location of a dispute does not load highly onto the same underlying concept that represents the tangible costs measure.

7 I updated several missing values using information from Gibler (2018).

8 Analyses indicate that this measure also does not load highly onto the concept of tangible costs as measured using the MID data. In other words, these are distinct factors.

9 Recall that one of my main arguments about using binary measure of international conflict relates to the fact that binary measures treat all war participants the same, even though they experience war differently. Obviously, this is not possible in civil war, in which there is one state participant.

10 Readers may wonder whether bad human rights lead to humanitarian intervention (international conflict), thus driving this relationship. Robustness checks using Mullenbach’s (2013) data show this is not the case.

11 This is also true for all other covariates.