This article presents a new dataset of indicators of political freedom, property rights and political instability for Zimbabwe for the period 1946 to 2005. The dataset is constructed by systematically coding the three concepts of political freedom, property rights and political instability along...

This article examines the effect of climate change on a type of armed conflict that pits pastoralists (cattle herders) against each other (range wars). Such conflicts are typically fought over water rights and/or grazing rights to unfenced/unowned land. The state is rarely involved directly. The...

Leadership turnover may produce significant foreign policy changes when leaders differ from their predecessors in their preferences over the resort to war and when they cannot commit to implement inherited policies. How, then, does the expected behavior of an incumbent leader's successor affect...

Although research on violent extremism traditionally focuses on why individuals become involved in terrorism, recent efforts have started to tackle the question of why individuals leave terrorist groups. Research on terrorist disengagement, however, remains conceptually and theoretically...

The literature on economic sanctions has long studied sender countries’ policymaking as a simple choice between imposing sanctions to extract concessions from the targeted country and doing nothing. We depart from this simplifying assumption and analyze sanctions as a multifaceted foreign...

Although individual citizens perceive the human rights conditions in their country differently, existing research on human rights and public opinion has tended to ignore the possible impact from international sources of information. This article builds upon previous research on human rights,...

Why do governments abuse human rights, and what can be done to deter and reverse abusive practices? This article examines the emerging social science on these two questions. Over the last few decades, scholars have made considerable progress in answering the first one. Abuse stems, centrally,...

Transnational advocacy organizations are influential actors in the international politics of human rights. While political scientists have described several methods these groups use – particularly a set of strategies termed ‘information politics’ – scholars have yet to...

Why does the discovery of oil lead to increased government repression in some countries and not others? Why is there variance in the extent to which democracy constrains state violations of human rights? We assume that an executive’s propensity to use violence against citizens is a...

It is commonly believed that torture is an effective tool for combating an insurgent threat. Yet while torture is practiced in nearly all counterinsurgency campaigns, the evidence documenting torture’s effects remains severely limited. This study provides the first micro-level statistical...