Human Rights Rogues in Interstate Disputes, 1980–2001
| Author | Mary Caprioli,Peter F. Trumbore |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343306061356 |
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
131
Introduction
Are there such things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ states,
and, if so, what makes them so? Are certain
types of states, with objectively identifiable
characteristics, more prone to aggression and
international violence than others? The
concept of the rogue state, which became
popular with US national security policy-
makers with the end of the Cold War, is
based upon the premise that states that
consistently violate important international
norms of behavior represent particular
dangers to international peace and stability.
For US policymakers, the norms that matter
are the international prohibitions against
supporting terrorism and illicitly developing
weapons of mass destruction. In short, states
that do these things are rogues, dangerous
actors ever threatening the stability and
security of the international system.
© 2006 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 43, no. 2, 2006, pp. 131–148
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343306061356
Human Rights Rogues in Interstate Disputes,
1980–2001*
MARY CAPRIOLI
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Duluth
PETER F. TRUMBORE
Department of Political Science, Oakland University
Rogue states have typically been characterized as those states that consistently violate accepted inter-
national norms of behavior. While US foreign policymakers and policy analysts have identified rogue
states as those violating a narrow set of international norms of external conduct, specifically terrorism
sponsorship and illicit pursuit of banned weapons, this article proposes an alternative understanding of
rogue state status that harks back to earlier notions of international pariah states, isolated from the rest
of international society, owing to their egregious treatment of their own citizens. Building on Galtung’s
concept of structural violence and feminist insights concerning the interconnectedness of violence at
all levels of human society, the authors develop a rogue state index to identify human rights rogues,
based on ethnic and gender discrimination and the violation of personal integrity rights. An import-
ant part of the rogue state formula developed by policymakers over the recent decades is the expec-
tation that such states represent dangers to international peace and stability. Focusing on the recognized
international human rights norms of non-discrimination and security of person, and informed by the
causal mechanisms inherent in the normative explanation for the democratic peace, this article tests
whether human rights rogues are more likely to become involved in militarized interstate conflicts and
violent interstate conflicts. The results of the analysis show that human rights rogues are more likely to
become involved in militarized interstate disputes in general, and violent interstate disputes specifically,
than other states during the period 1980–2001, suggesting that policymakers must keep a close watch
on serial human rights abusers, while seeking to identify future threats to international security.
* The data for this article can be found at http://
www.prio.no/jpr/datasets or obtained directly from the
authors: mcapriol@d.umn.edu; ptrumbor@oakland.edu.
But separate from, and predating, this
particular policy focus on problematic states
has been academic inquiry into these very
same questions: are certain types of states
more violent than others, and why? The
initial empirical research that would ulti-
mately result in the democratic peace thesis
was driven by such questions. Significantly,
however, it was the failure of early research
to produce the expected answer that drove
our current understanding of the relation-
ship between regime characteristics and
international conflict. As Benoit (1996)
points out, international conflict researchers
moved away from the idea of democratic
pacifism – that democratic regimes are in
general more peaceful than other types of
regimes – when their research failed to
produce statistically significant results.
Instead, the field turned its attention to the
less problematic finding that democracies
tend not to fight wars against each other.
And so the initial question has remained
largely unanswered.
Perhaps the key to predicting the inter-
national behavior of states will be found not
by trying to identify those internal charac-
teristics driving states toward peace, as the
investigators of democratic pacifism
attempted to do (Rummel, 1968; Small &
Singer, 1976; Weede, 1984), but rather in
identifying the internal characteristics
driving them toward conflict. In a funda-
mental way, we agree with the central
premise of the rogue state concept, that there
are states whose violation of recognized
international norms of behavior are indi-
cators of their aggressive character. Unlike
US policymakers, however, we contend that
the norms that matter are those of the inter-
national human rights regime governing
states’ treatment of their own citizens.
Indeed, our own prior research (Caprioli &
Trumbore, 2005) has shown that, as a group,
traditional rogue states (i.e. those supporting
terrorism or seeking to develop banned
weapons) do not evidence any difference in
international conflict behavior than other
states.
However, we have elsewhere (Caprioli &
Trumbore, 2003b) shown that states with
specific domestic patterns of systematic dis-
crimination on the basis of gender and eth-
nicity and general repressiveness – states we
label human rights rogues – are more likely
to engage in violence when involved in inter-
national disputes, specifically by using force
and doing so first. If human rights rogues are
also more likely to become involved in inter-
national disputes than other states, then this
finding takes on added significance. In this
article, we construct a composite indicator of
state observance of accepted international
human rights norms and examine whether
states that violate these norms are more likely
to become involved in interstate conflicts in
general and violent interstate conflicts in par-
ticular.
Societal Determinants of Interstate
Conflict Behavior
States become involved in militarized inter-
state disputes for a variety of reasons, some
of which are rooted in structural issues of
realpolitik, and others in societal-level
factors. A focus on societal-level variables is
particularly appealing in that such factors
have direct policy implications. In short,
they are amenable to change through the
effective application of appropriate domestic
policies. Current research concerning inter-
national conflict demonstrates a significant
shift in emphasis from structural to societal-
level concerns, partly as a response to a
decline of the systemic imperatives of the
bipolar era (Levy, 2000). Perhaps this
emerging pattern is most obvious within the
democratic peace literature, particularly
within the normative explanation (Brown,
Lynn-Jones & Miller, 1996; Ray, 1995;
Russett, 1993; Maoz & Russett, 1993;
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 43 / number 2 / march 2006
132
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