In celebration of the International Day of Peace, we are spotlighting National Academy of Sciences member James Fearon's research on civil conflict, which has far-reaching implications for the protection and promotion of human rights in conflict settings.  

The Relationship between Human Rights and Civil Conflict

As Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, Dr. James Fearon researches political violence, with a focus on finding explanations for civil conflict. We spoke with Dr. Fearon about the relationship between his work and human rights. (Responses have been edited for length and clarity.)

CHR: What connections have you been able to identify between civil conflict and human rights abuse through your research?
JF: One thing we know is that on average civil wars cause very high levels of human rights abuses. This is mainly due to abusive government actions and policies in civil wars and, to a lesser degree (on average), abuses by non-state armed groups. The countries and years with the worst human rights abuses are consistently those with the worst ongoing civil wars. For example, 80 to 85% of the country years with the highest level of human rights abuse are country years with a civil war in progress.

So civil wars cause human rights abuses, but do human rights abuses cause civil wars? This question is understudied. In cross-national time-series data sets, measures of the degree of human rights abuses are strongly predictive of subsequent civil war outbreak. Some of the observed relationship is probably spurious, however. Because coding the year of conflict onset is inherently imprecise, our cross-national human rights measures might be picking up on civil conflicts that have already begun. On the other hand, it is also quite plausible that an increase in human rights abuses in a country indicates that political conflict is escalating and that a broader civil war is more likely to begin. 

CHR: What benefits does being able to understand the various aspects of civil conflict offer to individuals seeking to promote and protect human rights?

JF: I think cross-national data collection and analysis in this area could be useful for individuals seeking to protect human rights by identifying relevant broad patterns. For instance: where and when do systematic human rights abuses tend to occur, where and under what conditions are abuses the worst, and how do the forms of abuse differ across time periods and settings? I think the main value of this information lies in improving the ability to identify places and people currently suffering badly and working to mobilize support for them and increase costs for the abusers.

CHR: Your work has confirmed that civil conflicts are more likely to occur in newly independent states and in countries classified as oil producers. In what ways do you see this information being useful for individuals working in the field of human rights? 
JF: These are just two things on a longer list of country-level factors that are, in different degrees, correlated with either the propensity of a country to have civil war over periods of time or the actual outbreak of conflict within a given country in the next several years. Understanding why these factors associate with civil war and, typically, terrible human rights abuses could be of value.

The reason human rights abuses tend to be extreme in civil wars has a great deal to do with the way that most civil wars in the last 70 years have been fought: as rural insurgencies and, with increasing frequency, by village and town-level militias in countries with collapsed central governments. In both situations, violence against non-combatants is often used in attempts to scare communities from providing support to an enemy or to punish communities suspected of having done so. Recent independence, low per capita income, and a government that gets its revenues from oil rents are all associated with serious problems with the state's ability to carry out competent administration, policing, and counterinsurgency that is not highly indiscriminate. These and other predictors are also associated with wholesale state collapse, which often leads to terrible human rights abuses by competing armed groups.
 
CHR: Have you identified any human rights issues that could benefit from further empirical studies/statistical analysis?
JF: It could be useful to systematically compare the countries and cases that the human rights community focuses on with data on where the most widespread and grievous abuses are actually happening at any given time. It is also surprising to me that there have not been more careful studies of the trajectory of human rights abuses prior to conflict, and whether or how this might be systematically predictive, especially given the amount of work that exists on predictors of civil war onset. There is an interesting literature on government repression and conflict, which is ripe for revisiting with better data that has become available and better methods for possibly untangling some of the knotty issues of causal inference in this area.