Empirical Research Of Human Rights Violations

Measuring human rights abuse, comparing human rights abuses across countrie, and making human rights abusers accountable

What you'll learn
The course provides an introduction to empirical research of human rights violations. Human rights violations occur across the globe ranging from genocide, to sexual violence, and to the targeting of non-violent protestors. How can we study these phenomena empirically? How can we measure human rights abuse? How can we generate empirical evidence to make perpetrators of human rights violations accountable? This course offers a hands-on introduction based on datasets commonly used in human rights research. I offer an introduction to the key concepts of human rights research and teach how human rights data can be analyzed with the free statistical software R. Students of this class will be equipped to conduct their own empirical analyses of human rights violations in their country of interest.
Requirements
No prerequisites
Description
This course provides an introduction to empirical research of human rights violations. The course covers different types of human rights abuses including torture, sexual violence, and other physical integrity rights violations. Students will develop an understanding of the key human rights concepts and the datasets that are commonly used in human rights research. The lecturer explains the differences between standards-based and events-based human rights datasets and discusses the inferences that we can draw from such datasets. Students will learn how fatalities in civil wars are counted and why such numbers must be treated with caution. The course also discusses recent evidence from empirical research about the perpetrators of human rights abuses and explains different instruments of transitional justice to account for human rights violations. Students will be equipped with the tools to conduct their own empirical analyses on human rights abuses in the country of their choice. This includes an introduction for beginners to the free software R that allows for statistical analyses of human rights abuses. The lecturer is an academic who published his own empirical research on human rights violations in several peer-reviewed academic journals (Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Global Security Studies,…) and who holds a degree from the University of Oxford.  The course includes the following lectures:1.) Introduction 2.) Types of human rights datasets: Introduction to the Political Terror Scale3.) The Armed Conflicts and Events Dataset4.) Measuring sexual violence during armed conflicts5.) Measuring torture and ill-treatment6.) Perpetrators of human rights abuses: Pro-government militias 7.) Transitional justice after human rights abuse and Conclusions8.) Statistical analyses of human rights abuses with R (Part I)9.) Statistical analyses of human rights abuses with R (Part II)10.) Statistical analyses of human rights abuses with R (Part III)

Overview

Section 1: Substantive lectures: Theory and concepts of human rights research

Lecture 1 Introduction

Lecture 2 Comparing human rights violations across the globe

Lecture 3 ACLED: Armed Conflicts and Locations Events Dataset

Lecture 4 Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts

Lecture 5 Torture and Ill-Treatment Database

Lecture 6 Actors of human rights abuses: Pro-government militias

Lecture 7 Transitional Justice and Conclusions

Lecture 8 Introduction to Statistical Data Analysis of Human Rights Data with R - Part 1

Lecture 9 Statistical Data Analysis of Human Rights Data Part II

Lecture 10 Statistical Data Analysis of Human Rights Data with R Part III

Everyone concerned about human rights violations