Optimal standard of human rights in countering an insurgency
Aniruddha Bagchi and Jomon A. Paul
Coles Research Symposium on Homeland Security Special Issue, SIFALL18-05, October 2018
We explore why human rights violations take place during a rebellion. Authoritarian governments may not care about human rights, but surprisingly, several democratic governments have also condoned violations. We show that the primary cause is faulty intelligence; we consider both types, missed alarms and false alarms. We also identify incentives that drive government armed forces to violate human rights as well as the optimal human rights standard in such circumstances. We then examine the effect of lowering the human rights standard on the probability of quelling the rebellion. In our theoretical model, this effect is indeterminate; that is, it can be positive or negative. We quantify it empirically using the case of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in India. Since the probability of quelling a rebellion is not directly observable, we use the magnitude of violence as its indicator and posit that the magnitude of violence should be negatively related to the probability of government success. We find that lowering the human rights standard increases violence and reduces the chance of quelling the rebellion, and this effect is statistically significant. Overview
18 | Coles Research Symposium
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs