Respect for human rights is one of several factors influencing US aid allocation decisions. Whereas previous research identifies human rights practices as being of secondary importance, it typically does not explore whether there is a more complicated relationship between human rights practices and US aid allocation. The authors argue that the impact of human rights varies at different levels of democracy and economic development. Employing data on 151 countries from 1977 to 2004, this study also investigates whether there has been an increase in the impact of human rights practices since the end of the Cold War. The results of the analysis show that during the Cold War, economic development was the prevailing factor in decisions about whether to allocate US aid. In the post-Cold War era, human rights practices are one among several significant variables, albeit exerting a generally negative impact. These results indicate that shifts in the international environment have, in fact, altered the determinants of US foreign aid. The authors further demonstrate that after the Cold War, countries with low economic development and transitioning regimes are subject to diminished levels of accountability for their human rights practices, while aid allocations to autocratic regimes follow the logic of promoting relatively higher human rights standards.

This study examines the demobilization of the Ogoni protest campaign in the oil producing Niger Delta region of Nigeria in the mid-1990s. The contentious politics literature suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of the polarization between radical and moderate protesters. In this study, we offer a different causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns can demobilize before such indiscriminate repression. Moreover, states can prevent the subsequent radicalization of a protest campaign followed by harsh repression by coopting the radicals and the remaining moderate elites while continuing to use repression to prevent collective action. Our conclusion assesses how relations between extractive industry firms and their local host communities have or have not changed in the twenty years since the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.

This study investigates the dynamics of transition from a peaceful protest wave to a violent insurgency. It examines the causal path leading to a major shift in the intensity of a protest wave and argues that the transition is the product of the interactions between the dissidents, the state, and external actors. By studying the protest wave in Kashmir (1979-88), it identifies state repression and external support as the key factors driving the transition process. Time series analysis is used to analyze the original empirical evidence collected through content analysis. By providing a comprehensive understanding of the origins of the insurgency in Kashmir, this study shows that protest waves and civil wars are intimately linked.

We investigate the differential effects of selective and indiscriminate repression on the rate of protest actions during the nonviolent resistance campaign in Gezi Park, Turkey, in 2013. After deriving theoretical expectations about how and why these forms of repression will influence protest actions, we test them with protest event data that were collected from a major local newspaper and subsequently validated through a comparison with two other independent Twitter datasets. Utilizing a Poisson autoregressive estimation model, we find that selective repression, as measured by the number of arrested activists who were detained while they were not demonstrating, decreased the rate of protest actions. Meanwhile, indiscriminate repression, as measured by the frequency of the government’s use of lethal and nonlethal violence against protesters during demonstrations, increased the rate of protest actions. Our findings support prior research on the influence of indiscriminate repression on backfire outcomes. They also provide evidence for the impact of selective repression on movement demobilization through the removal of opposition activists. Finally, the targeted arrest strategy of selective repression that was employed in the Gezi campaign has implications for the feasibility of the strategic incapacitation model of protest policing.

This volume focuses on a number of research questions, drawn from social movement scholarship: How does nonviolent mobilisation emerge and persist in deeply divided societies? What are the trajectories of participation in violent groups in these societies? What is the relationship between overt mobilisation, clandestine operations and protests among political prisoners? What is the role of media coverage and identity politics? Can there be non-sectarian collective mobilisation in deeply divided societies? The answers to these questions do not merely try to explain contentious politics in Northern Ireland; instead, they inform future research on social movements beyond this case. Specifically, we argue that an actor-based approach and the contextualisation of contentious politics provide a dynamic theoretical framework to better understand the Troubles and the development of conflicts in deeply divided societies.

This study argues that escalation and de-escalation processes lie at the heart of protest campaigns. These processes are largely determined by the interactions between protesters and governments, as well as the timing and types of strategies and tactics employed. The study examines the dynamics between the Turkish government and the protesters during the 2013 Gezi Protest Campaign. This campaign escalated quickly by generating massive support from different segments of the Turkish society in its earlier days, and then de-escalated and eventually demobilized without securing major concessions. By using original data collected from a Turkish newspaper, Cumhuriyet, the study illustrates how the trajectory of the Gezi campaign changed in response to the interactive dynamics between the government and the dissidents.

International Interactions

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