Ongoing Research
Holding Their Feet to the Fire: Negotiated Accountability in the Shadow of the International Community
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.
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.
What is the Effect of Personnel Transitional Justice on Crime? with Ipek Cinar, Monika Nalepa, and Evgenia Olimpieva (pdf)
What is the effect of transitional justice on crime in post-authoritarian states? An implicit assumption in the transitional justice literature is that by dealing with the human rights abuses committed by the previous regime, new democracies can improve the quality of human rights practices in the future. Personnel transitional justice, like most forms of transitional justice, should advance respect for human rights and lower crime levels. This should in particular apply to post-authoritarian purges, which re- move staff of former authoritarian agencies, including agents of repression, from institutions of the state. But what happens when entire organizations of the old regime apparatus are purged? Using novel data on transitional justice, we argue that this particular transitional justice process—what we call a thorough purge—can actually hurt human rights practices in the countries that have implemented it. We suggest that by removing entire networks of former authoritarian state officials from office, thorough purges can help lay foundations for the establishment of clandestine criminal organizations, which can, paradoxically, increase crime levels, contrary to the intentions of policymakers in new democracies.
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.
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.
What is the Effect of Personnel Transitional Justice on Crime? with Ipek Cinar, Monika Nalepa, and Evgenia Olimpieva (pdf)
What is the effect of transitional justice on crime in post-authoritarian states? An implicit assumption in the transitional justice literature is that by dealing with the human rights abuses committed by the previous regime, new democracies can improve the quality of human rights practices in the future. Personnel transitional justice, like most forms of transitional justice, should advance respect for human rights and lower crime levels. This should in particular apply to post-authoritarian purges, which re- move staff of former authoritarian agencies, including agents of repression, from institutions of the state. But what happens when entire organizations of the old regime apparatus are purged? Using novel data on transitional justice, we argue that this particular transitional justice process—what we call a thorough purge—can actually hurt human rights practices in the countries that have implemented it. We suggest that by removing entire networks of former authoritarian state officials from office, thorough purges can help lay foundations for the establishment of clandestine criminal organizations, which can, paradoxically, increase crime levels, contrary to the intentions of policymakers in new democracies.
