Human Rights in Democracies

ISBN-13: 9781138065277 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 202 str.

Peter Haschke

Opis

Violations of the right to the physical integrity of the person, such as torture, cruel and unusual punishment, extra-judicial executions, disappearances, and political imprisonment have long been treated as an anomaly in democratically governed societies. In the current literature on human rights, violations of this right are by and large seen the hall- mark of autocratic and repressive regimes. This study takes on this dominant paradigm and shows, not only that the common assumption that democratic countries effectively limit human rights abuse is simply wrong, but that its widely accepted theory of what drives human rights violations accounts at best for only a small part of these abuses.Haschke shows that despite the increasing numbers of countries that are democracies, and despite growing number of national signatories to international treaties prohibiting human rights abuse, the numbers of allegations has not declined and the bulk of abuse, which takes the form of torture and ill-treatment, extra-judicial killings, rape, and the like, is committed against marginal members of society, seems to reflect environments that enable agents of the state to abuse those with whom they are in contact, and is found in democracies and dictatorships alike. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, human rights and comparative politics.

Spis treści

1. The Not-So-Peaceful Domestic Democratic Peace  2. Approaches to the Study of Physical Integrity Rights Violations  3.  The Domestic Democratic Peace: A First Cut  4. The Standard Repression Model: A Second Cut  5.  A First Principle: Contact  6. Discriminating Among the Alternatives  7. Political and Non-Political Violations  8. Mechanisms of Non-Repressive Violations  9. Conclusion

O autorze

Peter Haschke is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, USA.