Treaties, Institutions & Torture: Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)." Scholarly inquiry on government's use of torture against detainees held by the government has focused primarily on ethical questions and medical/pyschological inquiries. Recently, however, two datasets have been released that systematically code the extent to which governments in different countries throughout the world use torture against detainees in their control. This has led to scientific inquiries into the impact of international law, political regime types, and other characteristics of economies and societies upon government's use of torture. Unfortunately, however, the questions one can explore with these data are rather limited. This project substantially expands the questions social scientists can explore. To expand the questions about torture that can be studied scientifically, this project codes data on four concepts: Incidence, Perpetrators, Motive, and Judicial Response. Amnesty International documents are analyzed over the years 1990-2007. In addition, data is collected on the Magnitude of victims, the Type of torture, the Perpetrator (i.e., the responsible government bureaucracy), and whether there was a Judicial Response to the allegation. The data we propose to collect will allow us to execute three distinct studies of the covariates of different dimensions of alleged torture. Those studies will address three questions: 1. Are the Scope of torture victims, and Types of torture used, influenced by the same domestic and international factors that have been shown to influence the Magnitude of torture victims? 2. What leads states to terminate \spells" of torture (where \spells" are defined over Magnitude, Type, and Perpetrator)? 3. What increases the likelihood that the state responds to an allegation of torture with a Judicial inquiry, and in some of those cases, prosecution? In addition to producing original scholarship the proposed research will generate a valuable new database that we will make available for free download via the World Wide Web. The project will thus directly inject social scientific work into the global discussion about torture, and will also facilitate other social scientists joining the conversation.