Treaties, Institutions & Torture: Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry

“这项奖励是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。”关于政府对被政府关押的被拘留者使用酷刑的学术调查主要集中在道德问题和医学/心理学调查上。然而，最近公布的两个数据集系统地记录了世界各地不同国家的政府对其控制下的被拘留者使用酷刑的程度。这导致了对国际法、政治制度类型以及经济和社会的其他特征对政府使用酷刑的影响的科学调查。然而，不幸的是，利用这些数据可以探索的问题相当有限。这个项目大大扩展了社会科学家可以探索的问题。为了扩大可以科学研究的酷刑问题，该项目对四个概念的数据进行编码：发生率、肇事者、动机和司法反应。国际特赦组织对1990年至2007年的文件进行了分析。此外，还收集了关于受害者人数、酷刑类型、肇事者（即负责任的政府官僚机构）以及是否对指控作出司法回应的数据。我们建议收集的数据将使我们能够对所谓酷刑的不同维度的协变量进行三种不同的研究。这些研究将解决三个问题：1。酷刑受害者的范围和所使用的酷刑类型是否受到已被证明影响酷刑受害者规模的相同国内和国际因素的影响？是什么导致国家终止“酷刑咒语”（其中“酷刑咒语”是根据大小、类型和施暴者来定义的）？是什么增加了国家以司法调查回应酷刑指控的可能性，在某些情况下，起诉？除了产生原创奖学金外，拟议的研究还将产生一个有价值的新数据库，我们将通过万维网提供免费下载。因此，该项目将直接将社会科学工作注入到关于酷刑的全球讨论中，并将促进其他社会科学家加入对话。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."Scholarly inquiry on government's use of torture against detainees held by the government has focused primarily on ethical questions and medical/pyschological inquiries. Recently, however, two datasets have been released that systematically code the extent to which governments in different countries throughout the world use torture against detainees in their control. This has led to scientific inquiries into the impact of international law, political regime types, and other characteristics of economies and societies upon government's use of torture.Unfortunately, however, the questions one can explore with these data are rather limited. This project substantially expands the questions social scientists can explore. To expand the questions about torture that can be studied scientifically, this project codes data on four concepts: Incidence, Perpetrators, Motive, and Judicial Response. Amnesty International documents are analyzed over the years 1990-2007. In addition, data is collected on the Magnitude of victims, the Type of torture, the Perpetrator (i.e., the responsible government bureaucracy), and whether there was a Judicial Response to the allegation.The data we propose to collect will allow us to execute three distinct studies of the covariates of different dimensions of alleged torture. Those studies will address three questions:1. Are the Scope of torture victims, and Types of torture used, influenced by the same domestic and international factors that have been shown to influence the Magnitude of torture victims?2. What leads states to terminate \spells" of torture (where \spells" are defined over Magnitude, Type, and Perpetrator)?3. What increases the likelihood that the state responds to an allegation of torture with a Judicial inquiry, and in some of those cases, prosecution?In addition to producing original scholarship the proposed research will generate a valuable new database that we will make available for free download via the World Wide Web. The project will thus directly inject social scientific work into the global discussion about torture, and will also facilitate other social scientists joining the conversation.