Explaining How Human Rights Protections Change After Internal Armed Conflicts

Societies emerging from internal armed conflicts display surprising variation in the degree to which governments protect human rights. Employing new data on civilian victimization by both government and rebel forces, we find that the human rights climate of a post-conflict country is not simply a perpetuation of pre-conflict conditions, or the result of repressive regimes remaining in power. Instead, the treatment of civilians during conflict has an independent impact on post-conflict human rights protections (HRP). Analyses of ninety-six post-conflict periods (1960-2015) show that when governments systematically and extensively target civilians during counterinsurgency campaigns, post-conflict human rights conditions decline substantially compared to pre-conflict levels, even accounting for other predictors of human rights violations, including pre-conflict human rights conditions. This holds regardless of who is in power after conflicts end. These findings have implications for theoretical models of repression and conflict cycles, and for practitioners and policymakers aiming to restore and protect human rights after war.