I Book Review: Understanding Human Rights Violations; New Systematic Studies
| DOI | 10.1177/016934410502300315 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Part D: DocumentationI Book Review |
530
Sabine C. Carey and Steven C. Poe (eds),
Understanding Human Rights
Violations; New Systematic Studies
, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot,
2004, xiii + 275 p. (index and references), ISBN 0 7546 4026 4*
Understanding Human Rights Violations is a very interesting book by political scientists,
bringing together recent empirical research. Testing hypotheses with statistical
material and comparing these findings with previous results is challenging for those
who are interested in the progress of the discipline of social sciences in the field of
human rights.
Moreover, the references to the relevant literature are fine and help the reader
to get a good overview of the state of the art with regard to this terrain of empirical
research based on statistical data.
All 14 chapters are brief, about 20 pages each, and all are quite clear in their
research plan which are well structured and the reader is able to evaluate the results
of each study with all data and correlations that are given. The results are often
disappointing, because no correlations are found where they were expected. In my
opinion this is too an interesting outcome and falsifies the prejudice against social
sciences that they only prove what everyone already knows. On the contrary, the
most obvious conclusions were not affirmed. Although this is interesting as such, the
researchers do not go beyond. Their premises and other prepositions were for
instance not critically scrutinised.
1. Introduction
The editors start with a description of the progress in human rights research from
political theory and philosophical and legal perspectives towards systematic social
scientific research on human rights, using systematic qualitative methods and
empirical tests in which human rights are related to other phenomena.
The goals of this volume are: 1) to expand understanding of why human abuses
occur; 2) to provide useful information for policymakers to end or at least minimise
human suffering; and 3) to contribute to an early warning system for human rights
violations. The editors acknowledge that they have not been successful in achieving
the second and third objective. Actions for practitioners and early warning for
governmental and non-governmental actors are not provided nor are predictions or
risks of various human rights abuses presented (p. 263). At the start of this volume, it
is mentioned that in previous studies ‘little headway has been made towards
forecasting and assessing the risk of human rights abuse’ (p. 8). This volume does
not contribute in a direct way to this goal. A critical comment is here appropriate as
the editors are rather pretentious in stating: ‘What is needed now is to pull the
gained knowledge together in an overarching theoretical framework and address
newly raised questions in a way that employs the latest research techniques and
makes the findings accessible to both the academic community and a general
audience. The collected works of this volume advance the systematic study of human
rights violations around the world, addressing those human rights that have received
little attention in previous work’ (p. 9). And they continue: ‘the chapter by Steven
Poe sets the stage by building a theoretical framework for the following contribu-
Documentation
* Fred Gru
¨nfeld is extraordinary professor in the causes of gross human rights violations at Utrecht
University and associate professor of international relations and of the law of international
organisations at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands.
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