The Impact of Transitional Justice on Human Rights and Democracy

由Leigh Payne（牛津大学）和Kathryn Sikkink（明尼苏达大学）提出的AHRC-NSF合作资助机会旨在发展一种经实证检验的过渡司法理论（即人权审判、真相委员会和大赦），以解释其对人权和民主的影响。它还努力制定一套相应的政策建议，以实现这些政治目标。合作者先前的研究使他们有资格参与这个项目。他们都发表了大量关于暴力、人权和民主化的文章。他们最近成立了独立的研究小组，开发关于过渡时期司法机制的大型跨国数据库。双方首次确认过渡时期司法对人权和民主具有积极影响。然而，他们的研究结果相互矛盾，促使他们合作开发一个新的项目，进一步提高对过渡时期司法的理解。拟议的项目将构建一个新的数据集，该数据集合并了它们的现有数据，增加了新收集和改进的关于过渡时期司法机制的数据，并采用混合方法来解释过渡时期司法在实现其政治目标方面的成功。定量研究，利用倾向得分和匹配技术，将允许研究人员从大n数据集进行推断，而定性研究，特别是模糊集定性比较分析（fs QCA），过程追踪和案例研究方法，使团队能够识别条件组合和/或多种因果途径对民主和人权的积极或消极影响。知识价值。拟议的项目将建立第一个经实证检验的理论，说明过渡时期司法何时、为何以及如何实现人权和民主目标。它将从四种理论方法中得出并检验假设：执法和威慑、规范和社会化、法治和稳定问责制。前三个重点是审判在带来积极政治变革方面的作用，这是两个研究小组确定的对过渡司法成功至关重要的机制。第四种方法考察佩恩研究发现的各种机制（即审判和大赦或审判、大赦和真相委员会）的组合如何取得这些积极成果。基于这些理论方法和先前的发现，合作团队创建了一个研究设计，这将使他们能够对过渡时期司法、人权和民主化的研究做出重要的理论贡献。他们将在国际学术会议上展示他们的发现，并发表学术文章，以推动一个理论化程度较低的领域的学术辩论。更广泛的影响。首先，这项研究将促进过渡时期司法政策。该项目确定了提高过渡时期司法成功可能性的机制和背景因素（即政治和经济条件、司法机构和政治机构）的具体类型和组合。这组科学家将制作一份政策蓝图，并在会议上向决策者展示他们的发现，将它们传播给相关组织，并在他们的网站上公开提供。这个合作项目源于一种创造性的方法，用于解决研究人员之前工作中相互矛盾的发现。这些研究人员没有利用他们不同的发现来划分不同的和相互竞争的项目，而是选择合作来实现重要的理论和政策目标。其次，合作者将在牛津过渡时期司法研究项目和明尼苏达大学过渡时期司法研究合作项目之间建立机构合作伙伴关系，双方研究人员都发挥主导作用，以维护数据集并鼓励未来的研究计划。第三，项目包括培训和专业化两个维度。研究小组的原始成员将继续作为顾问参与合作，贡献和提高他们的技能，并共同撰写学术论文。这个联合项目采用了先进的定量方法（例如，倾向评分、匹配技术）和定性方法（例如，fs QCA、过程追踪、案例研究），为顾问和研究团队的新牛津和明尼苏达研究生成员提供了新的培训。

The proposed AHRC-NSF Collaborative Funding Opportunity between Leigh Payne (University of Oxford) and Kathryn Sikkink (University of Minnesota) aims to develop an empirically-tested theory of transitional justice (i.e., human rights trials, truth commissions, and amnesties) to explain its impact on human rights and democracy. It also strives to develop a corresponding set of policy recommendations to achieve those political goals.The collaborators' prior research qualifies them for this project. Each has published widely on violence, human rights, and democratization. They recently formed separate research teams to develop large-N, cross-national data bases on transitional justice mechanisms. Both teams confirmed for the first time that transitional justice has a positive impact on human rights and democracy. Contradictory findings from their research, however, have motivated them to collaborate to develop a new project that further improves understanding of transitional justice. The proposed project will construct a new data set that merges their existing data, adds newly collected and refined data on transitional justice mechanisms, and employs a mixed-method approach to explain the success of transitional justice in achieving its political objectives.Quantitative research, utilizing propensity scores and matching techniques, will allow the researchers to make inferences from the large-N data set while qualitative research, specifically fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fs QCA), process-tracing, and the case study method, enables the team to identify combinations of conditions and/or multiple causal pathways for positive or negative effects on democracy and human rights.Intellectual Merit. The proposed project will build the first empirically-tested theory of when, why, and how transitional justice achieves human rights and democracy goals. It will derive and test assumptions from four theoretical approaches: enforcement and deterrence, norms and socialization, rule of law, and accountability with stability. The first three focus on the role of trials in bringing positive political change, a mechanism identified by both research teams as crucial to transitional justice success. The fourth approach examines how combinations of mechanisms (i.e., trials and amnesties or trials, amnesties, and truth commissions), findings from Payne research, achieve these positive results. Based on these theoretical approaches and previous findings, the collaborative team has created a research design that will allow them to make an important theoretical contribution to the study of transitional justice, human rights, and democratization. They will present their findings at international scholarly conferences and publish scholarly articles to advance academic debate in an under-theorised field.Broader Impacts. First, the study will advance transitional justice policy. The project identifies the specific types and combinations of mechanisms and contextual factors (i.e., political and economic conditions, judicial institutions, and political agency) that enhance the likelihood of success of transitional justice. The researchers will produce a policy blueprint and present their findings to policy-makers at conferences and meetings, disseminate them to relevant organisations, and make them publicly available on their website.The collaborative project emerges from a creative method for resolving contradictory findings in the researchers' previous work. Rather than using their different findings to carve out separate and competing projects, the researchers have chosen to collaborate to achieve important theoretical and policy goals. Second, the collaborators will build an institutional partnership between the Oxford Transitional Justice Research program and the University of Minnesota's Transitional Justice Research Collaborative, in which both researchers play leading roles, to maintain the data set and encourage future research initiatives. Third, the project includes training and professionalization dimensions. The original members of the research teams will remain involved in the collaboration as consultants, contributing and enhancing their skills, and co-authoring scholarly papers. The advanced quantitative (e.g., propensity scores, matching techniques) and qualitative (e.g., fs QCA, process-tracing, case study) methodologies incorporated into this joint project provide new training for the consultants and the new Oxford and Minnesota graduate student members of the research teams.