Empirical Research of Human Rights Violations

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 Scale

3.) The Armed Conflicts and Events Dataset

4.) Measuring sexual violence during armed conflicts

5.) Measuring torture and ill-treatment

6.) Perpetrators of human rights abuses: Pro-government militias

7.) Transitional justice after human rights abuse and Conclusions

8.) 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)