External threat and human rights: How international conflict leads to domestic repression

Abstract

When does interstate conflict lead to repression in warring countries? A long-held maxim in human rights literature is that governments repress when they feel threatened. International conflict would seem to threaten governments, yet recent literature has either ignored interstate conflict or found that international conflict has no effect in respect to human rights. In this article I examine how interstate conflict leads to domestic human rights violations by governments. Governments often attempt to increase their hold on political power by violating human rights when faced with external threats. Using a measure that incorporates information about the tangible costs of fighting, the location of conflicts, and the probability of defeat, I find that threatening international conflict has an immediate deleterious effect with respect to physical integrity rights and some civil rights.