Do attempts at accountability for war crimes in one state affect government behavior in another? A growing scholarship addresses the deterrence potential of human rights prosecutions. We examine whether deterrence extends beyond state borders, and why. We develop a theory of “neighborhood trials”—criminal proceedings against defendants in geographically and socially proximate states—and leaders' wartime behavior. We find that whereas a trial conducted in a neighboring state's domestic judiciary predicts reduced civilian killings in an ongoing conflict, an international neighborhood trial increases, rather than deters, violence. We adjudicate causal mechanisms with new fine-grained data on the International Criminal Court's activities. Early-stage interventions in the neighborhood may reinforce the image of a toothless court, emboldening observing leaders. Our findings suggest that although trials may deter local violence, their cross-border effects are contingent. The study informs broader research on the diffusion of state practices, transitional justice, and backlash against international institutions.

[Paper] [Online Appendix] [Replication Materials]

How does repression affect trust in government? Scholarship on the effects of state violence on political trust has produced conflicting evidence. We argue that one explanation is rooted in differences in the nature of violent repression and citizens' propensities to engage in motivated reasoning as a function of this violence. Whereas tactics such as political imprisonment reduce political trust, citizens rationalize particularly brutal tactics such as extrajudicial killings as “necessary” to reduce the cognitive discomfort of confronting lethal and irrevocable violence. We test the argument using disaggregated measures of physical integrity rights violations and survey data from Latin America. We find that trust in the executive hinges on both the type of repressive tactic and prior experience with crime. The study reveals the highly contingent nature of public support for state violence and provides theoretical resources for further probing the psychological foundations of citizen reactions to repression.

[Paper] [Online Appendix] [Replication Data]

International organizations employ public diplomacy like states, yet we know little about how they strategically allocate diplomatic resources. We examine determinants of high-level visits by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to understand how this body balances principled goals with strategic constraints. We theorize that visits serve dual functions: signaling international scrutiny to repressive regimes while cultivating soft power where conditions favor human rights progress. Using original data on OHCHR delegation travel (1998-2019), we show that OHCHR visits target highly repressive states but are significantly more likely in places with a greater peacekeeping presence and democratization episodes, which we argue provide reach and create receptive local audiences, respectively. These findings suggest that OHCHR visits are jointly motivated by need and domestic political opportunities for influence. By demonstrating this international organization's strategic use of visit diplomacy, we shed light on an understudied mechanism for advancing human rights norms.

[Paper (open access)] [Online appendix] [Replication data]

Civil society inclusion in peace processes has many positive externalities, but does inclusion lead to improved rights for civil society actors themselves? We theorize how civil society actors leverage peace processes to secure state commitments to an improved advocacy environment after conflict. Using new data on civil society participation in peace negotiations (1990-2020), we show that participation significantly increases the likelihood of a provision formalizing these actors' procedural rights in the resulting peace agreement. This relationship is conditional on relatively low pre-agreement repression of civil society, suggesting a minimal threshold of freedoms for effective advocacy during negotiations. Civil society actors in conflict settings may allocate scarce advocacy resources to secure procedural protections of their post-conflict survival, not only principled outcomes. The findings point to a possible mechanism allowing civil society to influence longer-term policy outcomes after conflict.

[Paper] [Online appendix] [Replication data]

Recent advances in text-as-data provide new opportunities to document how elites shape public discourse on contentious issues. Using a novel word embeddings approach to measure elite-driven political narratives in local news, we analyze Kenyan newspaper coverage of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) prosecutions against domestic leaders. We train our embeddings on an original corpus of 5,292 Kenyan newspaper articles from 2007-2020 and identify significant changes in how local media vilifies the ICC before, during, and after major investigations. We find that as the case progressed, the ICC became more strongly associated with terms of bias and illegitimacy, an association which quickly dissipated after the Court terminated its last proceeding. Our approach illustrates the utility of text-based measures of political sentiment on contentious issues, with implications for research on media narratives, the effects of controversial jurisprudence on public discourse, and backlash against international institutions.

[Paper] [Online appendix] [Replication data]

How do domestic trials addressing wartime violence affect public opinion of government? The legitimation functions of national courts are well studied in liberal democracies, but less is known about the effects of trials that address abuses committed during large-scale conflict. This article investigates how the extent to which such trials achieve procedural justice (fairness in process) and retributive justice (allocation of punishment) affects perceptions of political legitimacy. I provide survey-experimental evidence from post-conflict El Salvador that leverages the repeal of a longstanding amnesty law. Although a trial in general improves citizen evaluations of state competence, fairness and punishment serve crucial—and distinct—legitimation functions. Procedural fairness significantly increased citizens’ willingness to comply with state authorities, regardless of trial outcome. Yet, an unfair trial, when coupled with punishment, bolstered trust in politicians and the judiciary, suggesting a trade-off between public preferences for fairness and an “iron fist” approach to punish violence. The findings reveal the limits of procedural justice in a post-conflict environment and furnish new insights on the multifaceted functions of human rights trials.

[Paper] [Online Appendix]

How does transitional justice affect trust in government? Political trust is central to peaceful conflict resolution, but less is known about the ability of different transitional justice efforts to build confidence in government after war. Using survey-experimental evidence from post-conflict Guatemala, I compare how three commonly deployed justice policies (trials, truth commissions, reparations) and political rhetoric accompanying them affect citizen attitudes towards government. Exposure to information about a trial or reparations program, which convey costly signals, led to significantly higher levels of political trust and perceived political legitimacy compared to the truth commission. Further, a moral rhetoric emphasizing the normative claims of war victims was significantly more effective than either an instrumental rhetoric emphasizing institutional benefits or the absence of justification, regardless of policy content. The micro-level evidence reveals how the trust-building functions of transitional justice are far from uniform, speaking to the pivotal role of political communication.

[Paper] [Online Appendix] [Replication materials]

How do human rights organizations (HROs) shape transitional justice policy in countries emerging from conflict? We investigate this question in the context of peace processes, a vital stage when many key post-conflict policies are determined. Using granular data on the content of peace agreements, we show that the robust domestic presence of HROs significantly increases the likelihood of provisions promising criminal accountability for wartime crimes. Yet, this impact depends on the involvement of impartial third parties and ratification of international human rights instruments that mitigate risks to HROs during the peace process. These findings reveal a novel pathway through which HROs help to place transitional justice on the national agenda in the wake of large-scale violence.

[Paper] [Online Appendix] [Replication materials]

Human rights prosecutions addressing wartime crimes are often credited for deterring future rights abuses, but routinely coexist with state repression. This article develops and tests a theory of how such prosecutions generate uneven effects across domestic human rights practice by making some repression tactics costlier than others – in the public visibility of the abuse or ease of attribution to leadership – or by directly substituting certain tactics. We test the implications with a multivariate probit analysis of novel prosecution data in contemporary conflict and post-conflict settings. Trials significantly reduce reliance on political imprisonment and extrajudicial killings, relatively visible abuses, whereas gains for less visible physical integrity rights are limited. Further, trials themselves are sometimes deployed as a direct substitute for political imprisonment. The findings reveal how “human rights” prosecutions themselves can be part of a government’s repressive toolkit, with implications for the study of transitional justice and the judicialization of repression.

[Paper] [Online Appendix] [Replication materials]

Apology diplomacy promises to assuage historical grievances held by foreign publics, yet in practice appears to ignite domestic backlash, raising questions about its efficacy. This article develops a theory of how political apologies affect public approval of an apologizing government across domestic and foreign contexts. The authors test its implications using large-scale survey experiments in Japan and the United States. In the surveys, the authors present vignettes about World War II grievances and randomize the nature of a government apology. They find that apology-making, both as statements acknowledging wrongdoing and as expressions of remorse, boosts approval in the recipient state. But in the apologizing state, backlash is likely among individuals with strong hierarchical group dispositions—manifested as nationalism, social-dominance orientation, and conservatism—and among those who do not consider the recipient a strategically important partner. This microlevel evidence reveals how leaders face a crucial trade-off between improving support abroad and risking backlash at home, with implications for the study of diplomatic communication and transitional justice.

[Paper] [Online Appendix] [Replication materials]

While text-messaging is an efficacious method of disseminating health information in developing contexts, we know less about how users adapt their behavior based on that information. Does it matter how the information is conveyed? This paper presents findings from a randomized field experiment that evaluates the impact of a Short Message Service (SMS) sexual health counseling service on individuals' knowledge and behavior in an urban informal settlement of Nairobi, Kenya. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions which tested different mechanisms through which technology-enabled information provision could work to alter sexual behavior: (1) information gap reduction, (2) personalization and (3) social cues. The evidence suggests that personalizing the information and providing signals about how other people in the community are behaving can dramatically minimize sexual health risk, compared to simply reducing the information gap. Additionally, individuals receiving generic, non-personalized health information were more likely to engage in risky behavior compared to their counterparts.

[PDF (ungated)] [ACM website]