The Impact of Transitional Justice on Human Rights and Democracy

Leigh Payne(牛津大学)和Kathryn Sikkink(明尼苏达大学)之间拟议的AHRC-NSF合作资助机会旨在发展一种经过经验检验的过渡司法理论(即人权审判、真相委员会和赦免)，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加这个项目。每一本书都广泛地发表了关于暴力、人权和民主化的文章。他们最近成立了单独的研究小组，以开发关于过渡司法机制的大型跨国数据库。两个小组都首次确认，过渡时期司法对人权和民主有积极影响。然而，他们的研究发现相互矛盾，促使他们合作开发一个新项目，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，合并他们现有的数据，添加关于过渡司法机制的新收集和改进的数据，并采用混合方法来解释过渡司法在实现其政治目标方面的成功。定量研究将利用倾向得分和匹配技术，使研究人员能够从大N数据集中做出推断，而定性研究，特别是模糊集定性比较分析(FS QCA)、过程跟踪和案例研究方法，使团队能够确定条件的组合和/或多种因果路径对民主和人权的积极或消极影响。拟议的项目将建立第一个经过经验检验的理论，即过渡司法何时、为什么以及如何实现人权和民主目标。它将从四种理论方法中推导和检验假设：强制和威慑、规范和社会化、法治和稳定的问责。前三项侧重于审判在带来积极政治变革方面的作用，两个研究小组都认为这一机制对过渡时期司法的成功至关重要。第四种方法考察佩恩研究的结果如何结合各种机制(即审判和赦免或审判、赦免和真相委员会)取得这些积极成果。根据这些理论方法和以前的研究结果，合作小组创建了一项研究设计，使他们能够对过渡时期司法、人权和民主化的研究作出重要的理论贡献。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，以推动这个理论不足的领域的学术辩论。首先，这项研究将推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。研究人员将制定一份政策蓝图，并在会议上向政策制定者展示他们的发现，将其传播给相关组织，并在其网站上公开。这个合作项目源于一种创造性的方法，以解决研究人员先前工作中相互矛盾的发现。研究人员没有使用他们不同的发现来划分独立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司法研究项目和明尼苏达大学过渡司法研究合作项目之间建立机构合作伙伴关系，双方研究人员都在其中发挥主导作用，以维护数据集并鼓励未来的研究倡议。第三，该项目包括培训和职业化维度。研究团队的原始成员将继续以顾问的身份参与合作，贡献和提高他们的技能，并共同撰写学术论文。这一联合项目采用了先进的定量方法(如倾向分数、匹配技术)和定性方法(如f-QCA、过程跟踪、案例研究)，为咨询人员以及牛津和明尼苏达州研究生组的新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.