Human rights organizations (HROs) like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch play important roles in elevating global awareness of situations of injustice and brutality. By monitoring and reporting on human rights situations worldwide and calling out the perpetrators, these groups help direct the public eye toward state-backed abuses such as torture, extrajudicial killings, and genocide. However, not all states around the world receive the same scrutiny from these groups, which raises the question: why do human rights organizations choose to shame and criticize some states over others for human rights abuses?

A new study published in Social Problems from Center for Environment, Community, and Equity (CECE) Postdoctoral Fellow Arman Azedi uses cross-national data from 155 countries to address this question. Gathering data from machine-coded readings of news media articles, Azedi builds a new dataset comprising over 3,700 instances in which an HRO’s criticism of a state was covered in international news media. The findings suggest that HROs tend to focus on states that enact the most severe torture and murder against civilians. Moreover, the results point to the importance of domestic political mobilization in drawing the attention of HROs: countries that are enduring anti-government protests tend to experience greater scrutiny from HROs. Finally, the results also point to differences between HROs in their resources and reach. While Amnesty International, the largest and most well-funded group, is capable of penetrating and reporting on societies which have less informational access to the rest of the world (such as cell phones and internet access), these countries tend to fall off the agenda of other HROs, likely because smaller HROs have fewer resources to assess domestic human rights situations.

Read the full article here.