Human Rights Quarterly
Volume 38, Number 4, November 2016
http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/35304

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Articles
Human Rights, Gender, and Infectious Disease: From HIV/AIDS to Ebola
pp. 993-1021
Lara Stemple, Portia Karegeya, Sofia Gruskin
ABSTRACT:
Two global health crises, HIV/AIDS and Ebola, have drawn legal and political attention to the fact that infectious disease does not affect all citizens of the globe equally. Of the many factors operating to render some more vulnerable than others, human rights and gender equality play vital roles, as the international community learned in response to HIV/AIDS. An examination of the recent Ebola outbreak demonstrates once again that the promotion and protection of human rights, inclusive of a gender perspective, should underpin all interventions from the outset, so as to more effectively respond to Ebola and all public health crises.
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Articles
The Criminal Community of Victims and Perpetrators: Cognitive Foundations of Citizen Detachment From Organized Violence in Mexico
pp. 1038-1069
Andreas Schedler
ABSTRACT:
After its successful transition to democracy, Mexico has experienced an epidemic of organized societal violence known as the drug war that, to date, has caused well over 100,000 casualties. Most of this violence has been consigned to oblivion, without proper investigation or prosecution. Victims have been organizing and protesting, yet ordinary citizens have remained quiet, except for two short lived waves of nationwide protest. As I hypothesize, a primary reason for their acquiescence is cognitive. The framing of organized violence as a self-contained war among criminals (“bounded violence”) erodes the attitudinal foundation of citizen solidarity and sympathy with the victims of injustice. I explore the cognitive foundations of citizen attitudes towards victims on the basis of original data from the Mexican 2013 National Survey on Organized Violence. Logistic regression analysis confirms the expected framing effect. Even when controlling for alternative explanations, such as personal proximity to violence and social proximity to its victims, the notion of bounded violence within a criminal community induces citizens to view its victims with indifference.
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Articles
United States Military Assistance and Human Rights
pp. 1070-1101
Wayne Sandholtz
ABSTRACT:
Since the 1970s, US law has made military assistance conditional on the human rights record of recipient governments. The prospect of receiving US military aid would, in principle, create an incentive for states to respect rights. This study assesses whether US military aid has exercised the hoped-for positive influence on human rights in recipient countries, a question for which no published research exists. The analysis of data from over 150 countries covering thirty years indicates that US military assistance is associated with worse performance on human rights.
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Articles
Introduction to the Societal Violence Scale: Physical Integrity Rights Violations and Nonstate Actors
pp. 1102-1108
Linda Cornett, Peter Haschke, Mark Gibney
ABSTRACT:
Measures of physical integrity rights violations typically focus on abuses by state actors. However, nonstate actors also represent a grave threat to personal security. This article introduces the Societal Violence Scale (SVS) which uses the US State Department Human Rights reports as a basis for developing a new scale of physical integrity rights abuses by nonstate actors to gain a more comprehensive, but at the same time disaggregated, picture of human security threats across the globe.