Research
Holding Their Feet to the Fire: Negotiated Accountability in the Shadow of the International Criminal Court
Dissertation
What explains the variation in who is held accountable for the commission of atrocities during conflict? How, if at all, does the threat of International Criminal Court intervention influence the justice mechanisms parties to a conflict agree to implement? This dissertation project unpacks the dilemma parties to a conflict face in the era of a Court of last resort: how to minimize the accountability they face when ignoring the international may provoke intervention. While much of the literature remains divided about the effects of international law and the mechanisms by which it shapes domestic political behavior, I argue that under certain conditions, international criminal tribunals in particular can have important effects. Using insights from a formal bargaining model, I argue that the domestic processes established under the shadow of tribunals like the ICC are reflective of international and domestic power politics that can hurt or, under some conditions, actually help those most responsible for atrocity. I evaluate the theory using novel empirical data on the implementation of justice mechanisms, as well two case studies.
Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946-2016) with Ipek Cinar and Monika Nalepa, forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics (pdf, tables and figures, appendix)
In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project.
Identifying the Causal Effect of Truth Revelation Procedures on the Quality of Democratic Representation with Milena Ang and Monika Nalepa (pdf)
Does transitional justice hinder or help democracy? This is a question hard to address methodologically because countries embarking on transitional justice may be the same ones that would have had a successful pathway to democratization. Hence the problem of identifying the causal relationship between transitional justice and quality of democracy. To resolve it, we leverage one of the problems associated with coding transitional justice events. In 2016 Onur Bakiner criticized one of the leading assumptions in the transitional justice literature: that mechanisms for dealing with the past can be assigned a discrete implementation date. This assumption is unwarranted because scholars have difficulty assigning a fixed year of implementation. To take truth commission as an example, qualitative research associates two to four years for the operation of truth commissions (Bakiner 2016). We address the criticism by organizing data on all truth revelation procedures (truth commissions and lustrations) as a time series of events. Not only is this more accurate/faithful to the process on the ground, but it allows us to implement a diff-in-diff research design to identify the casual effect of truth revelation procedures to the quality of democracy. We use quality of democracy indicators from V-Dem and merge them with our Global Transitional Justice Dataset to find convincing evidence that truth revelation procedures and truth commissions in particular, decrease the level of political corruption and help decrease the influence of former authoritarian elites.
Dissertation
What explains the variation in who is held accountable for the commission of atrocities during conflict? How, if at all, does the threat of International Criminal Court intervention influence the justice mechanisms parties to a conflict agree to implement? This dissertation project unpacks the dilemma parties to a conflict face in the era of a Court of last resort: how to minimize the accountability they face when ignoring the international may provoke intervention. While much of the literature remains divided about the effects of international law and the mechanisms by which it shapes domestic political behavior, I argue that under certain conditions, international criminal tribunals in particular can have important effects. Using insights from a formal bargaining model, I argue that the domestic processes established under the shadow of tribunals like the ICC are reflective of international and domestic power politics that can hurt or, under some conditions, actually help those most responsible for atrocity. I evaluate the theory using novel empirical data on the implementation of justice mechanisms, as well two case studies.
Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946-2016) with Ipek Cinar and Monika Nalepa, forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics (pdf, tables and figures, appendix)
In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project.
Identifying the Causal Effect of Truth Revelation Procedures on the Quality of Democratic Representation with Milena Ang and Monika Nalepa (pdf)
Does transitional justice hinder or help democracy? This is a question hard to address methodologically because countries embarking on transitional justice may be the same ones that would have had a successful pathway to democratization. Hence the problem of identifying the causal relationship between transitional justice and quality of democracy. To resolve it, we leverage one of the problems associated with coding transitional justice events. In 2016 Onur Bakiner criticized one of the leading assumptions in the transitional justice literature: that mechanisms for dealing with the past can be assigned a discrete implementation date. This assumption is unwarranted because scholars have difficulty assigning a fixed year of implementation. To take truth commission as an example, qualitative research associates two to four years for the operation of truth commissions (Bakiner 2016). We address the criticism by organizing data on all truth revelation procedures (truth commissions and lustrations) as a time series of events. Not only is this more accurate/faithful to the process on the ground, but it allows us to implement a diff-in-diff research design to identify the casual effect of truth revelation procedures to the quality of democracy. We use quality of democracy indicators from V-Dem and merge them with our Global Transitional Justice Dataset to find convincing evidence that truth revelation procedures and truth commissions in particular, decrease the level of political corruption and help decrease the influence of former authoritarian elites.
