The Politics of Measurement: The Contested Count of the Disappeared in Argentina

Brysk, Alison

doi:10.2307/762564

Cited by 59 publications

(40 citation statements)

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“…The clandestine nature of counterterrorism cooperation makes it difficult to study this directly, and previous research on rendition has been plagued by uncertainty and a lack systematic data and empirical evidence. This article provides a unique contribution to a wider discussion within the field of political science that considers how to deal with the issues involved in measuring partially observable processes such as repression and human rights violations (Brysk, 1994;Fariss, 2014;Dancy and Fariss, forthcoming). I seek to overcome these common challenges by creating a predictive model to identify international cooperation in extraordinary rendition.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This article contributes to a wider discussion within the field of political science that considers how to deal with the issues involved in measuring partially observable processes such as repression and human rights violations. Brysk (1994) describes the systematic measurement of complex political processes as "the first critical step" in quantitative research. Recent research in international relations and human rights has continued this call by emphasising the importance of adopting measured and careful analyses grounded in accurate data (Fariss, 2014;Dancy and Fariss, forthcoming).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Measuring extraordinary rendition and international cooperation

Cordell

2017

International Area Studies Review

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Following the launch of the global war on terror, the United States of America established a global rendition network that saw the transfer of CIA terrorist suspects to secret detention sites across the world. There has been considerable debate over how many countries participated in rendition and secret detention during the post-9/11 period, and conventional accounts of foreign complicity suggest that diverse countries were involved, including many established democracies. However, research on rendition has been plagued by uncertainty, a lack of data and systematic empirical evidence due to the secret nature of counterterrorism cooperation. In this article, I argue that it is possible to study the practice of rendition, unlike many other forms of clandestine security cooperation, as it is partially observable. Specifically, suspected extraordinary rendition flight paths can be tracked using publicly available flight data. This article uses the world's largest set of public flight data relating to rendition to estimate cross-country collaboration in rendition and secret detention. The result suggests 307 likely rendition flights and 15 new participating countries beyond the 54 known cases, with cross validation tests demonstrating high levels of model accuracy.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring extraordinary rendition and international cooperation

Cordell

2017

International Area Studies Review

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“…Alison Brysk (1994) makes this point in an essay that highlights the difficulties inherent in the measurement of repressive actions. She notes ''the importance of careful specification of the political processes being modeled through measurement and explicit justification of the use of particular measures to represent those processes' ' (1994, 692).…”

Section: Measurement Of Human Rights Practicesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Dynamic Patterns of Human Rights Practices

Schnakenberg¹,

Fariss

2013

PSRM

167

116

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The science of human rights requires valid comparisons of repression levels across time and space. Though extensive data collection efforts have made such comparisons possible in principle, statistical measures based on simple additive scales made them rare in practice. This article uses a dynamic measurement model that contrasts with current approaches by (1) accounting for the fact that human rights indicators vary in the level of information they provide about the latent level of repression, (2) allowing realistic descriptions of measurement uncertainty in the form of credible intervals and (3) providing a theoretical motivation for modeling temporal dependence in human rights levels. It presents several techniques, which demonstrate that the dynamic ordinal item-response theory model outperforms its static counterpart.

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“…While this may be factually true, it is important to situate the debate about data with regard to the politics of numbers and measurements. Numbers are not objective depictions of reality but implicitly involve political judgements about how phenomenon should be measured and results interpreted (see, e.g., Alonso and Starr, 1987;Brysk, 1994). Scholars have recently begun to seriously examine the power of numbers and measurement in global and transnational governance (Hansen and Muhlen-Schulte, 2012;Hansen and Porter, 2012).…”

Section: Counting Land Grabs and The Politics Of Numbers/measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives

2013

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Land grabbing has emerged as a significant issue in contemporary global governance that cuts across the fields of development, investment, food security, among others. Whereas land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, having historical precedents in the eras of imperialism, the character, scale, pace, orientation and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical phenomenon closely tied to major shifts in power and production in the global political economy. Land grabbing is facilitated by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North-South imperialist tradition. In this introduction we argue that land grabbing speaks to many of the core questions of globalization studies. However, we note scholars of globalization have yet to deeply engage with this new field. We situate land grabbing in an era of advanced capitalism, multiple global crises and the role of new configurations of power and resistance in global governance institutions. The essays in this collection contribute to identifying land grabbing as an important and urgent topic for theoretical and empirical investigations to deepen our understanding of contemporary globalization and governance.

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The Politics of Measurement: The Contested Count of the Disappeared in Argentina

Cited by 59 publications

References 1 publication

Measuring extraordinary rendition and international cooperation

Measuring extraordinary rendition and international cooperation

Dynamic Patterns of Human Rights Practices

Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives

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