Transcript Human Rights and Information Technology the Post WW II Era

Human Rights and Information
Technology
Building a Global Human Rights Knowledge Base for
the Post WW II Era
Introduction
• An Information Age effort to identify and
document human rights events
– Going from a data base to an information base
to a knowledge base
• Part of a larger project conducted by the
Cline Center for Democracy
– The Societal Infrastructures and Development
Project (the SID)
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Organization
• Introduce the SID
• Discuss the SID’s event analysis & the need for
an improved human rights knowledge base
• Event Analysis: A Brief Overview
• Comparison of SID and prior human rights
event analyses
• Shortcomings of our approach
• The SID and academic research on human
rights
• The SID and the advancement of human rights
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
The SID
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An empirical study of institutions, national settings and
development for 177 nations in the post WW II era
– By societal infrastructures we mean
• Institutions
– Economic,
– Legal,
– Political systems
• The context within which institutions operate:
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Resource endowments,
Intensity of group-based strife,
Level of economic development,
Economic structure,
Strategic setting,
etc.
– By development we mean
• Economic
• Human
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Human Rights
Environmental Quality
Infant Mortality
Etc.
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Focus on Institutions
 Of all the factors that can affect societal
welfare, institutional designs are the most
amenable to human intervention and change
 This presumes we know how, where and when different
institutional designs
 SID is designed as a rigorous test of the
“Liberal Paradigm”
 It is an empirical starting point not an article of faith
 We allow for the possibility that different institutional
designs will work in different settings and different times
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID Data Collection Effort
• Multi-year effort
– $1.5M already invested in direct costs
– Variety of specialized research teams
• Three Components
– Integrate readily available archival data
– Create targeted data collection projects
• Legal infrastructures, legal education, free trade, national
elections, environmental quality, natural resources, etc.
– Major cross-cutting projects
• The Comparative Constitutions Project
– Computer-aided coding of every constitution in world, 1789– 668 survey questions; over 1300 raw variables
• The Event Analysis
– Compilation and analysis of global news reports
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Analytical Objectives
• We want to
– Develop new cross national measures of economic,
political and legal institutions
– Use these measures jointly to gauge national
institutional designs for post WW II era
– Use variations in institutional designs, in conjunction
with national settings, to assess their independent
impact on welfare indicators, including human rights
– Use the results of these analyses to provide an empirical
base for nation-building efforts
• Developing a Collaboration with the Public International Law
and Policy Group (PILPG) for real world applications
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Human Rights and the Event Analysis
• Human Rights: A Key Dimension of Well-being
– Not subject matter experts
• Can’t be for all of the substantive domains!
– SID: Highly decentralized Effort
• Review of the Literature
– Revealed paucity of sound data on human rights
– Need to develop a sound human rights information base
and develop it into a knowledge base
• Capitalizing on existing data using advance IT
• Analysis, reflection, dialogue
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Approaches to Documenting Human
Rights Violations
• Landman’s 2004 article notes 4
approaches
– Qualitative
• Amnesty International, State Department
– Survey data
• Eurobarometer, World Barometer, World Values
– Event data
• Minorities at risk, World Handbook
– Quantitative summaries
• Freedom House
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Event-based Approaches
• Landman suggests these are the most
promising for constructing a human rights
knowledge base
– Are the source of information for all other approaches
– Provide the basis for
• “meaningful, valid time-series data”
• “second order” analyses of human rights events
• Notes a “tradeoff” between event-specific
information and cross-national comparison
– The structure of the SID event analysis minimizes this
tradeoff
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID Event Analysis: Sources
• Contemporary (2006-)
– Cline Center News Website Crawl
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600 websites; 4800 newsfeeds
Websites located in over 120 nations; 95% of global population
1-12 hours intervals
15,000 articles captured each day (5.5M total)
Historical (1946-2006)
– 25M+ articles
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New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Federal Broadcast Information Service
Summary of World Broadcasts (?)
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID Event Analysis: Definition of
Human Rights Events
• We are as comprehensive as possible in our
definition of human rights events
– Categories come from
• the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Exploratory phase of event analysis
• Two Main Categories
– Regard for Human Life Events
– Respect for Human Rights Events
• Nearly one-quarter of our categories deal with
human rights events (political expression,
property rights, etc.)
– 45 categories of a 200 category classification scheme
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Regard for Human Life Events
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Genocide
Loss of human life (excluding death penalty)
Application of the death sentence
Non-lethal injury to humans
Wanton disregard for human life, despite no actual harm
Coercive constraint of humans
Involuntary servitude
Initiatives to prevent physical harm (not peacekeeping)
Engagement of peacekeeping forces
Actions to release detained individuals
Failure to engage in activities that would have prevented harm
Acts aimed at compensating those injured by prior actions
Post hoc remedial acts by states that have inflicted physical harm
Verbal criticism of those who have inflicted physical harm
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Regard for Human Rights Events
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Basic citizenship rights
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The right to privacy
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National citizenship
Right to equal treatment
Provision of asylum
Right to domestic travel
Right to international travel
Treatment of refugees
Treatment of immigrants
Other basic citizenship rights
Sexual orientation
Reproductive matters
Other aspects of an individual’s body
Violations of private space
Electronic surveillance
Other privacy matters
Marital and family rights
Treatment of state detainees
Social rights
Employment rights
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Event Analysis: The Automatic Text
Classification Program
• Dealing with 30M+ articles and a 200 category
scheme requires careful use of most
sophisticated and powerful ATC programs
• We use
– Machine learning techniques; and
– Extensive computer-aided human categorization
• Exploratory Phase and three-wave pretest
– 100,000 randomly selected articles
– Human categorized to teach computer
– Excellent results midway into 2nd wave of pretest
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID Event Analysis: Data Mining
• We plan to use a combination of human
coding and the most sophisticated and
appropriate data mining tools available
– Computer-aided surveys that have both
• General queries
• Category-specific queries
– Chaining technologies
• Link related events together for data mining
• Provide for creation of human rights “episodes”
– Not yet at the data mining stage
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Human Rights Event Analysis: A
Comparison
• Sources
– Most prior event analyses use NYT
• Wholly inadequate for global coverage
• Time Frame
– 1946 – on
• Most studies start around 1976
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Human Rights Event Analysis: A
Comparison
• Inclusiveness; we capture
– Most types of human rights violations
• Other studies are more limited (human integrity), or
• Don’t differentiate carefully across violations
– Events that involve respect for human rights
– Events involving private actors
• Important for understanding national culture
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Human Rights Event Analysis: A
Comparison
• Unit of analysis
– The human rights event
• Most studies employ country-year
• Analytically limiting
– We will have 1-2 M human rights events
• Not all independent
• Many will be:
– Follow-up stories
– Redundant coverage
– Enormous Implications for building human rights
knowledge base
• Cross-national, time series data
• Linked data on human rights episodes
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Human Rights Event Analysis: A
Comparison
• Richness of information base
– Event-specific data
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Who
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– Nested in SID’s
• Institutional data
• Contextual data
– Supplemented by
• Chain data from antecedent and aftermath events
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Human Rights Event Analysis:
Principal Shortcomings
• Can’t capture events that never make it into the
press
– True of any approach that is a quantitative, crossnational study
• Our ATC procedures are highly likely to capture events if they
are reported
• Less than 1% lost by computer screening
– Those that don’t base their assessment on valid news
reports are likely to be contaminated by ideological or
some other form of bias
– Bottom-line: Many not be able to accurately capture all
countries for all years.
• Good news is that we are likely to know what to exclude
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Human Rights Events and
Academic Research
• Events Data and academic research on Human
Rights
– Enrich
• Our efforts designed to capitalize on key academic insights
– HR violations occur when regime authority is threatened
– Context matters
» Internal setting
» International setting
– Energize
• New people
• New analytic capabilities
– Number of events; temporal and spatial dimensions to data
– Richness of information on events and settings
– Chaining of information on episodes
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
SID’s Human Rights Knowledge Base
and the Promotion of Human Rights
• Transforming the SID data base into a
human rights data base through rigorous
academic research can have payoffs
– Can use empirical based insights to
• Determine the effectiveness of different strategies
• Understand the conditions under which they will be
most effective
– Working with PILPG and other groups will
enhance these payoffs
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois
Three Human Integrity Examples
• Early warning indicators and preemptive
actions
– What characteristics of events and contexts can produce
insights into likely regime responses?
– How can these insights be used to minimize violence
• Nation-focused strategies to minimize violence
– When will international sanctions (warning, aid cutoff,
boycotting, threatened military intervention) be effective?
• Perpetrator-focused strategies to minimize
future abuses
– What are the effects of national institutional designs on
human rights abuses?
– What are effects of prosecutions of offenders?
Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois