DEVELOPMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS: AN ALTERNATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

A significant body of research indicates that development and human rights are related. This “modernization theory of human rights” suggests that as poor countries achieve higher levels of socioeconomic development, human rights conditions improve. While it is clear that the human rights records of the most highly developed countries are quite good, this article examines whether levels of development are connected to human rights conditions in the rest of the world. Measures of economic and socioeconomic development are examined against two scales of political terror based on annual reports from Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department. The findings indicate that human rights and development are not significantly related in the less developed world and suggest that efforts to promote human rights need to go beyond assisting rights‐abusing states based on past notions of developmental aid.