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How do human rights violations affect post-election protest? Until recently, post-election protests have been explained primarily by election-related factors such as the level of manipulation and the quality of electoral institutions. We argue that there are three dimensions along which human rights violations influence post-election protest: (1) the physical cost to protesters, (2) the ability to connect the violation to an election outcome, and (3) the ability to connect the repressive action to the government. Using this framework, we identify political imprisonment as the physical integrity right violation most likely to increase the probability of post-election protest. We test our hypotheses empirically with data on all national-level elections in the world between 1982 and 2012. We find that political imprisonment, a violation easily connected to government action and election outcomes, and less costly physically than other physical integrity rights violations, increases the probability of post-election protest.

This article outlines a human rights framework for analyzing violent internal conflict, "translating" social-scientific findings on conflict risk factors into human rights language. It is argued that discrimination and violations of social and economic rights function as underlying causes of conflict, creating the deep grievances and group identities that may, under some circumstances, motivate collective violence. Violations of civil and political rights, by contrast, are more clearly identifiable as direct conflict triggers. Abuse of personal integrity rights is associated with escalation, and intermediately repressive regimes appear to be most at risk. Denial of political participation rights is associated with internal conflict because full democracies experience less conflict. Yet democratization itself is dangerous, since regime transition is also a major conflict risk factor.

This paper examines the conviction that robust peacekeeping—a strong and forceful peacekeeping force—works better than traditional UN peacekeeping mechanisms in reducing human rights violations, specifically, civilian killing, in areas of deployment. I seek to analyze both the operational and internal characteristics of UN peacekeeping operations in an effort to understand the hindrances to achieving the objective of protecting human rights. Specifically, the study examines the contributions of key structural variables, including the mission type, weapon type, rules of engagement, mission strength, and major power participation controlling for other intervening variables using negative binomial and logit regression models. The empirical results indicated that the core variable ―robust peacekeeping‖ has impact on civilian killings, namely that it lowers civilian killings. The key factor seems to be strength of mission size associated with lower numbers of civilian killings. Great power participation, peacekeeper diversity and affinity with the host state, along with identity conflicts and at least proto-democratic status of the host state appear to be harbingers of potentially higher deliberate civilian killing totals. The findings thus have both theoretical and policy implications in the field of peacekeeping.

THIS ARTICLE RECOUNTS THE EVENTS FOLLOWING THE DECEMBER 1989 U.S. INVASION OF PANAMA. IT EMPAHSIZES THE UNNECESSARY KILLING OF CIVILIANS AND DESTRUCTION OF CIVILIAN PROPERTY THAT TOOK PLACE. IT CONCLUDES THAT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT COMMITTED GENOCIDE AGAINST THE PANAMANIAN PEOPLE, A CRIME WHICH IS CODIFIED UNDER THE NORMS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW. THE EXTENT OF THE DEATH AND DAMAGE HAS BEEN SEVERELY UNDERSTATED BY U.S. MILITARY AUTHORITIES.