PSCI 5820
A Research Seminar on
International Human Rights
Spring 2002
Instructor:
Steve Poe
Office:
153 Wooten Hall
Office
Phone: 565-2325
E-mail:
Steven_C_Poe@UNT.EDU
Office
Hours: My office hours will be from 1:50-2:50, Monday and Wednesday, and 12:30
to 2:50 on Thursday. I am also available
by appointment at many times Monday thru Friday when I'm not in class or a
meeting. See me and we'll set up a
satisfactory time.
Introduction
In
the last three decades we have seen a substantial increase in interest in human
rights, and discussion of human rights-related issues in the international
arena. We have witnessed a proliferation
of treaties, as well as the foundation of international institutions designed
to enforce agreed upon human rights standards.
In spite of this undeniable progress, however, social scientists have
barely started to examine human rights related phenomena in a systematic manner.
Our
major aim in this seminar will be to work toward the "cutting edge"
of knowledge on this topic, putting seminar participants in a position where
they can conduct scientific research in this field, with substantial knowledge
of the development of the human rights movement.
A
first step toward this goal is to gain the background sufficient to conduct
such research. Toward this end we will
first get a feel for the human aspect of the problem, by reading personal
accounts of serious human rights abuses, histories, and case studies. We will discuss scholarly squabbles over the
definition and measurement of the term "human rights," and the
philosophies that underlie these differences.
Having
fulfilled these goals, we will be able to examine and evaluate the movement to
incorporate the scientific method to understand human rights-related
phenomena. We will explore the work that
has attempted to identify "the causes" of human rights shortcomings,
and a second vein of research that seeks to understand how human rights
criteria affect the foreign policy decisions of the U.S. government. Finally seminar students will have the
opportunity to test their own abilities to conduct meaningful research in this
subfield.
It is hoped that at the end of this class students will have created a project that after some refinement will be appropriate for presentation at a scholarly conference and\or as a submission to a scholarly journal. Student paper presentations will provide students with much needed practice at presenting their research to a critical, informed audience, that will ask the tough questions.
Student Responsibilities
1. Discussion: Since this is a seminar
class your participation and attendance are requisite. Note that to achieve an acceptable
performance level you will be required to complete a fairly large amount of
reading PRIOR to each meeting In order
to achieve an 'A' participation grade students must know all the material, and
be able to critique the work effectively.
It is expected that 'A' students will read some of the suggested
readings, and will come to class with ideas as to routes future research should
take.
.
Students
will be expected to hand in a set of three (3) questions about the readings for
each week. These questions should be
comparable to final examination or Comprehensive Examination (essay) questions,
designed to provoke thought and discussion among class participants. Participants' questions will be used in part
to structure seminar discussions. They
should be sent via e-mail to me by 9 A.M. each Tuesday morning, so I can
include them as a part of the agenda for class discussion. (See my e-mail address, above.) The quality of questions will be included in
the instructor's assessment of your in-class performance. Also, in some weeks students will be expected
to make oral presentations.
2. Midterm Test: An in-class essay test
will be given. That test is scheduled
for Tuesday, March 26. The Wooten
Computer Lab will be reserved for this exercise.
3. Research Paper: Students should follow
the style manual of the APSA, which is used for the APSR. You should choose topics as eary in the
semester as is possible. It is hoped
that the results of your research will, after revisions, be suitable for use as
a conference paper and/or a submission to a scholarly journal. The due date for papers is Tuesday, April
30. A one page research proposal with
preliminary bibliography will be due on Tuesday February 19. One purpose of this exercise is to force
seminar participants to begin their papers early, for their own good. It is also hoped that professorial feedback
will prevent students from sprinting down dark alleys that are dead ends.
4. Final
Exam Research Presentation: As a final exam students will be expected to
share the results of their research with the rest of the class, and to field
questions from other participants in the seminar. The length of the presentations will be
determined at a later date, depending on the size of the seminar, but will be
roughly the length that would one might be asked to give at a scholarly
conference.
5. Grading:
Participation 20%
Midterm
Test 20%
Research
Paper 40%
Final
Exam Presentation 20%
100%
Required
Reading Materials
1.
Donnelly, Jack. 1989. Universal Human Rights in Theory and
Practice. Cornell University Press: Ithaca.
2.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Anchor Books: New York.
3. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy
Networks in International Politics.
Cornell University Press: Ithaca.
3.
A collection of article length readings that will be made available on reserve
at the UNT Copy Center.
Recommended
1.
Michael Lewis-Beck. 1980. Applied
Regression: An Introduction. Beverly
Hills: Sage. (For those who need an introduction to statistical
methodologies. Copies are floating
around the Political Science Department.)
2.
Perusing a book on research design and methodology is strongly recommended for
those that have not had, or are not currently taking a Political Science Scope
and Methods course.
Course
Outline and Readings
Tentative Class Schedule
Note:
For each week there is a list of required assigned readings. For most weeks I have also listed a set of
suggested readings. These citations are
provided for students interested in pursuing the topic further and are not made
available in the readings packet.
Part One:
Introduction
Week
1. (January 15) Orientation Session
Required:
A careful reading of this syllabus. Discussion of Expectations.
Week
2. (January 22): Normative Theories of Human Rights
Required:
Donnelly (Chapters 1-6, 9-13) Reminder--Do not
forget to do your questions, see above.
Suggested:
Shue, Henry.
1996. Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy.
Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.
John Locke. First
Treatise on Government, Chapter 6, paragraphs 57-8., and the Second Treatise on Government, 1,
2,5,7,8,19.
Thomas Hobbes.
Leviathan.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract, Book 1.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On the Jewish Question.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the U.S.
Bill of Rights.
Jerome J. Shestack.
1998. “The Philosophic
Foundations of Human Rights,” Human
Rights Quarterly 20:201-234.
Scan Human
Rights Quarterly in recent years for other pieces relating to Third World
conceptions of human rights, and human rights conditions in those areas.
Week
3. (January 29) Explaining why Personal (or Physical) Integrity is Violated
Required:
Pion-Berlin, David and George Lopez. 1991.
"Of Victims and Executioners: Argentine State Terror,
1975-1979," International Studies
Quarterly 35:63-86.
Steven C. Poe, C. Neal Tate and Linda Camp
Keith. 1999. “Repression of the Human
Right to Personal Integrity Revisited: A Global Crossnational Study Covering
the Years 1976-1993,” International
Studies Quarterly 43:291-313.
McCormick, James M and Neil J, Mitchell. 1997. Human Rights Violations, Umbrella
Concepts, and Empirical Analysis World
Politics 49(4)510-525.
Matthew Krain.
1997. State Sponsored Mass
Murder: The Onset and Severity of Genocides and Politicides Journal of Conflict Resolution
41:331-360.
Moore,
Will. 2000. “The Repression of Dissent:
A Substitution Model of Government Coercion.”
Journal of Conflict Resolution
44:107-27.
Suggested:
Christian Davenport.
1995. "Multidimensional Threat Perception and State Repression: An
Inquiry into Why States Apply Negative Sanctions," American Journal of Political Science 39:683-713.
David Louis Cingranelli (Ed.) Human Rights and Developing Countries JAI: Greenwich, CT.
T. David Mason and Dale A. Krane. 1989.
"The Political Economy of Death Squads: Toward a Theory of the
Impact of State-Sanctioned Terror," International
Studies Quarterly, 33:175-198.
Dipak Gupta, Harinder Singh, and Tom Sprague. 1993.
"Government Coercion of Dissidents: Deterrence or
Provocation?" Journal of Conflict
Resolution, 37:301-39.
Edward N. Muller.
1985. "Income Inequality,
Regime Repressiveness, and Political Violence." American
Sociological Review. 50: 47-61.
Conway Henderson. 1991. "Conditions Affecting
the Use of Political Repression." Journal
of Conflict Resolution 35(1):120-42.
Conway Henderson.
1993. "Population Pressures
and Political Repression." Social
Science Quarterly 74:322-333.
Dean Hoover and David Kowalewski. 1992.
"Dynamic Models of Dissent and Repression" Journal of Conflict Resolution
36:150-182.
Scott Sigmund Gartner and Patrick M. Regan. 1996. "Threat and Repression: The Non-Linear
Relationship Between Government and Opposition Violence," Journal of Peace Research, 33:273-287.
Ronald A. Francisco.
1996. “Coercion and Protest: An Empirical Test in Two Democratic
States,” American Journal of Political
Science 40:1179-1204.
Will H. Moore.
1998. “Repression and Dissent:
Substitution, Context, and Timing. American Journal of Political Science
42:851-873.
4.
Week 4 (February 5): Measurement of PI
Violations
Required:
George A. Lopez and Michael Stohl. 1992.
Problems of Concept and Measurement in the Study of Human Rights,"
in Thomas B. Jabine and Richard P. Claude (eds.), Human
Rights and Statistics: Getting the Record Straight. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Robert
Goldstein. "The Limitations of Using Quantitative Data in Studying Human
Rights Abuses" in the Jabine and Claude volume cited immediately above.
Mark Gibney and Matthew Dalton. 1996. "The Political Terror Scale,"
In David Louis Cingranelli (Ed.) Human
Rights and Developing Countries.
Cingranelli David and David Richards. 1999. Measuring the Level, Pattern and
Sequence of Government Respect for Physical Integrity Rights,” International Studies Quarterly.
43:407-417.
Steven C. Poe, Tanya Vazquez
and Sabine Carey. 2001. “How are These
Pictures Different? An Empirical Comparison of the U.S. State Department and
Amnesty International Human Rights Reports, 1976-1995,” 23:650-677.
Suggested:
Several other articles in the Jabine and Claude
book, including "A Guide to Human Rights Data Sources," by Cain,
Claude, and Jabine, that you might find useful in locating data for research
papers, and the piece by Bollen..
Dipak K. Gupta, Albert J. Jongman, and Alex P.
Schmid. 1993. "Creating a Composite
Index for Assessing Country Performance in the Field of Human Rights: Proposal
for a New Methodology," Human Rights
Quarterly, 15:131-62.
David L Cingranelli (ed.). 1988. Human Rights: Theory and Measurement,
New York: St. Martins Press.
Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr. 1988. “Toward Empirical Theory of Genocides
and Politicides: Identification and Measurement of Cases Since 1945.” International Studies Quarterly
32:359-371.
Week
5. (February 12) The Linkage Between Development and Freedom
Sen (all)
Suggested:
Donnelly, Jack.
1999. “Human Rights, Democracy and Development.” Human Rights Quarterly 21:608-632.
Milner, Wesley T., Steven C. Poe and David
LeBlang. 1999. Security Rights, Subsistence Rights and
Liberties: A Theoretical Survey of the Empirical Lanscape Human Rights Quarterly 21:403-443.
Morris David Morris.
1979. Measuring the Condition of
the Wolrd’s Poor: The Physical Quality of Life Index 1960-1990. New York: Pergamon.
Bruce E. Moon and William J. Dixon. 1992. "Basic Needs and Growth-Welfare
Trade-offs," International Studies
Quarterly, 36:191-212.
Bruce E. Moon.
1991. The Political Economy of Basic Human Needs.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
William J. Dixon and Bruce E. Moon. 1987.
"The Military Burden and Basic Human Needs," Journal of Conflict Resolution,
30:660-685.
Required:
William H. Meyer. 1996. “Human Rights and MNCs: Theory Versus
Quantitative Analysis Human Rights
Quarterly 18:368-397.
Jackie Smith, Melissa Bolyard and Anna
Ippolito. 1999. “Human Rights and the Global Economy: A
Response to Meyer” Human Rights Quarterly
21:207-219.
William H. Meyer.
1999. “Confirming, Infirming and “Falsifying” Theories of Human Rights:
Reflections on Smith, Bolyard and Ippolito Through the Lens of Lakatos” Human Rights Quarterly 21:220-228.
David Richards, Ronald Gelleny and David Sacko. 2001. “Money With A Mean Streak? Foreign
Economic Penetration and Government Respect for Human Rights in Developing
Countries" International Studies Quarterly.
Cingranelli, David L.,
and David L. Richards. 2000. "Measuring the Impact of
Human Rights Organizations" In NGOs and Human Rights: Promise and
Performance, ed. Claude
Welch, University of Pennsylvania Press.
A one page research proposal is due today, complete
with a preliminary bibliography.
Suggested:
McCorquodale, Robert. with Richard Fairbrother.
1999. “Globalization and Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 21:735-766.
Week
7. (February 26) Transnational Advocacy Networks
Required:
Keck and Sikkink, all.
Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, Kathryn Sikkink
(Eds.). 1999. The Power of Human Rights: International
Norms and Domestic Change, Cambridge University Press: London.
Week
8 (March 5): Human Rights and Foreign Policies
Required:
David L. Cingranelli and Thomas Pasquarello. 1985.
"Human Rights Practices and the U.S. Distribution of Foreign Aid to
Latin American Countries." American
Journal of Political Science, 29:539-63.
James M. McCormick, and Neil J. Mitchell. 1988.
"Is U.S. Aid Really Linked to Human Rights in Latin America?" American Journal of Political Science 32:231-239.
Clair Apodaca and Michael Stohl. 1999. “United States Foreign Policy and
Foreign Assistance,” International Studies Quarterly 43:185-198.
Patrick M. Regan.
1995. "U.S. Economic Aid and Political Repression: An Empirical
Evaluation of U.S. Foreign Policy," Political
Research Quarterly 48:613-29.
Shannon Lindsey Blanton. 2000. “Promoting Human Rights and Democracy
in the Developing World: U.S. Rhetoric vs. U.S. Arms Exports,” American
Journal of Political Science 44:123-131.
Suggested:
Shannon Lindsey Blanton. 1994.
"Impact of Human Rights on U.S. Foreign Assistance to Latin
America" International Interactions
19:339-358.
Shannon Lindsay Blanton. 1999. “Instruments of Security or Tools of
Repression? Arms Imports and Human Rights Conditions In Developing Countries,” Journal of Peace Research 36:233-244.
Daniel J. B. Hofrenning. 1991. "Human Rights and Foreign Aid: A
Comparison of the Reagan and Carter Administrations," American Politics Quarterly, 18:514-26.
David P. Forsythe.
1993. Human Rights and Peace: International and National Dimensions,
Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press.
David Carleton and Michael Stohl. 1987. "The Role of Human Rights in U.S.
Foreign Assistance Policy." American
Journal of Political Science, 31:1002-18.
James M. McCormick, and Neil J. Mitchell. 1989.
"Human Rights and Foreign Assistance: An Update. Social Science Quarterly, 70(4):969-79.
Steven C. Poe. 1990. "Human Rights and U.S.
Foreign Aid: A Review of Quantitative Studies and Prescriptions for Future
Research," Human Rights Quarterly,
12:499-512.
Steven C. Poe .
1991. "Human Rights and the Allocation of U.S. Military Assistance,"
Journal of Peace Research, 1991,
28:1-12.
Steven C. Poe.
1992. "Human Rights and Economic Assistance under Ronald Reagan and
Jimmy Carter," American Journal of
Political Science, 36:147-167.
Steven C. Poe and Rangsima Sirirangsi. 1994 "Human Rights and U.S. Economic Aid
During the Reagan Years," Social Science Quarterly, 75: 494-510.
David Cingranelli.
1993. Ethics, American Foreign Policy and the Third World, New York: St.
Martins Press.
Week
9: (March 12) Democracy, Constitutionalism, Women’s Rights
Required:
Helen Fein.
1995. "More Murder in the Middle: Life Integrity Violations and
Democracy in the World, 1987." Human Rights Quarterly 17:170-191.
Gibson, James L.
2001. “Social Networks, Civil Society and the Prospects for Russia’s
Democratic Transition, American Journal of Political Science 45:51-69.
Linda Camp Keith, C. Neal Tate and Steven C. Poe 2002. “Constitutional Protections, Judicial
Independence and State Repression of Personal Integrity: Is the Law a Mere
Parchment Barrier to Human Rights Abuse? Unpublished manuscript.
Clair Apodaca.
1998. “Measuring Women's Economic and Social Rights Achievement” Human Rights Quarterly 20;139-172.
Suggested:
There is much traditional, non-quantitative research on
women’s rights, but not much that is empirical and scientific.
For some studies in the traditional vein see Rebecca J.
Cook. 1994. Human Rights of Women:
National and International Perspectives, University of Pennsylvania Press:
Philadelphia.
Davenport, Christian. 1996. “‘Constitutional Promises’ and Repressive Reality: A Cross-National Time-Series Investigation of Why Political and Civil Liberties are Suppressed,” Journal of Politics 58: 627-654.
Sabine Zanger (Carey) 2000. “A Global Analysis of the Effect of Political Regime Changes on Life Integrity Violations 1977-1993,” Journal of Peace Research 37:213-233.
Week
10. (March 19) Refugees, Humanitarian Disasters and Early Warning
Required:
Gibney, Mark, Claire Apodaca and J. McCann. 1996. “Refugee Flows, the Internally
Displaced and Political Violence (1908-1993): An Exploratory Analysis.” In Alex Schmid, ed., Whither Refugee? The Refugee
Crisis: Problems and Solutions.
Leiden: PIOOM.
Schmeidl, Susanne. 1997.
"Exploring the Causes of Forced Migration: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis,
1971-1990," Social Science Quarterly,
78:284-308.
Juha Auvinen and E. Wayne Nafziger. 1999. “The Sources of Humanitarian
Emergencies. Journal of Conflict Resolution 43:267-290.
Peter Brecke.
1998. "Finding Harbingers of Violent Conflict: Using Pattern
Recognition to Anticipate Conflicts" Conflict
Management and Peace Science 16:31-56.
Ted Robert
Gurr and Will H. Moore. 1997. “Ethnopolitical Rebellion: A Cross-Sectional
Analysis of the 1980s with Risk Assessments for the 1990s,” American Journal of Political Science
41:1079-1103.
Suggested:
Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr. 1998.
“Systematic Early Warning of Humanitarian Emergencies,” Journal of Peace Research 35:551-579.
Leon Gordenker. 1992 “Early Warning of Disastrous Population
Movement.” International Migration Review
20:(2)170-189.
Susanne Schmeidl, and J. Craig Jenkins. 1998.
“The Early Warning of Humanitarian Disasters: Problems in Building an
Early Warning System” International
Migration Review 26:471-486.
Week
11. (March 26) Midterm Test
Required:
Completion of the cumulative in-class essay exam. Students will be given 2:15 minutes to
complete the exam, which will be given in the Computer Lab on the first floor of
Wooten Hall.
Part Four:
Preparing and Presenting Studies of Human Rights Related Phenomena
Weeks
12, 13, 14: Time Off for Good Behavior
This period should be used to finish research
papers, and to meet on an individual basis with the instructor so that he can
be of assistance.
Weeks
15 and 16 (April 30, May 7)
Students present their own research in a simulated
academic conference as a Final Exam. The
rest of the class will act as an audience.
A final thought: Graduate seminars are similar to bullfighting--what matters most in both arenas is the quality of the bull. In the current arena I have found that the bull is much greater when students are prepared.