US noninvasion troops deployed abroad often try to promote greater respect for human rights in the host country. The host country, having an incentive to retain the troop presence, may choose to comply with these requests. We argue that this effect will not be at play in states with high security salience for the United States (US) (for which the US may not be able to credibly threaten to remove the troops). In these cases, US deployments will provide the leader with security from both internal and external threats that is independent of the local population's support for the leader. Host state leaders thus become less reliant on (and potentially less responsive to) their local populations, which in turn may lead to increased human rights violations. In this article, we use data on both US troop deployments abroad and on human rights violations to test these arguments from 1982 to 2005.

Using a risk assessment method developed by Gurr and Moore ( American Journal of Political Science 41: 1079–1103, 1997) and applying O’Brien’s ( Journal of Conflict Resolution 46: 791–811, 2002) risk assessment metrics, we present a global, comparative, cross-national model predicting the states where political violence is likely to increase. Our model predicts more political violence when governments violate the physical integrity rights of their citizens—especially when they frequently imprison citizens for political reasons or make them “disappear”. These coercive techniques may create more citizen dissatisfaction than other types of violations of physical integrity rights, because citizens perceive political imprisonment and disappearances as the direct result of the deliberate policy choices of politicians. Our model also forecasts more political violence in weak states and states that allow dissatisfied citizens to coordinate their anti-government activities. Specifically, we demonstrate that political violence tends to be higher if governments respect their citizens’ right to freedom of assembly and association and offer widespread use of mobile phone and internet technology.

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Past research on regime type and civil war points to anocratic regimes as having a high probability of civil war onset. The specific characteristics of anocratic regimes that lead to their predisposition for civil war have been left unexplained. In this article, the authors examine how the transitional characteristics of anocracy explain the enhanced risk of civil war onset. The results point to three important conclusions. First, anocratic regimes are most likely to experience civil war in the first few years of their duration. Second, transitions into anocracy from democracy leave states at a higher risk of civil war. Third, the probability of civil war onset increases with the magnitude of a transition into anocracy.Research into the causes of civil war has identified anocratic governance and/or the existence of a political transition as a particularly high-risk regime characteristic. Manypossibly the modal category of studies-demonstrate a curvilinear relationship between regime characteristics and the likelihood of civil war onset, with highly autocratic and highly democratic states' being considerably less vulnerable than anocracies (e.g., Reynal-Querol 2002;Sambanis 2004;Urdal 2005;Regan and Norton 2005). In short, there seems to be something about the vulnerability of states with political regimes in the middle of the autocratic-democratic continuum that makes them more prone to the outbreak of civil war. There is, however, insufficient clarity as to whether this risk is associated with the process of regime transitions or with specific politicalinstitutional characteristics of these regimes. We develop a model of the transition process and empirically test hypotheses from this model against the data that form the backbone of our empirical understanding of the curvilinear relationship, the POLITY data.The puzzle we face has two interwoven components. That is, there are two paths to anocracy in the POLITY data; one is as a stable condition reflecting institutionalized regime characteristics; the other by transitioning into or through the anocratic category. Most studies do not account for the differing effects of this data-generating process (an exception is Hegre et al. 2001); therefore, we face a daunting task of understanding adequately the role of regime characteristics on civil war onset. We articulate a theoretical model of the transition process and test hypotheses from that model against the POLITY data. Briefly, our results demonstrate that there are specific aspects of transitions into anocracy that help explain the high risk of civil war among this set of states. A transition from democracy into anocracy significantly increases the risk of civil war, while a similar transition up from autocracy into anocracy has little discernible impact on the likelihood of civil war.Much like the early democratic peace arguments, the anocratic instability arguments are a result of uncovering an empirical regularity that exists in the data. We extend beyond the empirically driven results to incorporate an expla...

Why does repression sometimes work to stop violent protest and sometimes heighten protest? We argue that the effect of repression on protest depends critically on a “memory of violence” within the state. Without this memory, the costs of continued protest in the face of increased repression are often too great for unrelenting mobilization, effectively suppressing the political violence. We focus on a global sample of repression and protest data at the weekly level from 1990 to 2009. In states with civil war histories, repression can mobilize a population previously primed for violent protest.