What is the State of the World’s Human Rights today?
Our report examines 144 countries and paints a picture of States playing with a fire that threatens to scorch the future for generations to come.
Read more: amn.st/63321B6A1y7
🔵 Do politicians trade human rights for the benefits of arms deals? Not more than citizens do. Those are findings from @tobiasrisse.bsky.social & @chrisvsteinert.bsky.social's survey experiments conducted on public and elite samples in 🇬🇧 & 🇩🇪. Just published in JCR: doi.org/10.1177/0022...
Trading Arms, Trading Values? Experimental Evidence on Attitudes Toward Arms Exports Among Citizens and Political Elites Tobias Risse and Christoph Valentin Steinert Foreign policy making involves balancing ethical values and instrumental concerns. Do politicians and citizens differ in how they weigh these factors when directly confronted with this trade-off? Focusing on attitudes toward arms exports, we argue that citizens, but not politicians, tend to prioritize human rights concerns over the political and economic benefits for their own states. We tested these arguments in four survey experiments among citizens and parliamentarians in the United Kingdom and Germany. We presented participants with fictitious arms deals and varied the human rights records of recipient regimes as well as the benefits of arms deals to assess how these factors influence attitudes toward arms exports. While we find substantial effects of both human rights violations and benefits on support for arms exports, their interaction remains insignificant across all samples. Hence, our findings yield no evidence for an elite-public gap in weighing ethical and instrumental concerns in foreign policy attitudes.
Check out our (w/ @chrisvsteinert.bsky.social) new article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution on how citizens and politicians weigh moral and instrumental concerns when forming attitudes toward arms exports. For more information, see abstract below or the full article: doi.org/10.1177/0022...
Our findings raise serious concerns for accountability. On average, the German public is less likely to acknowledge police misconduct against immigrant victims, even when it is confirmed by an official government investigation, which can hinder efforts to hold perpetrators accountable. (3/3)
Our findings show that participants judge the same instance of police violence more leniently when the victim is named Mohamed Ahmed instead of Thomas Schneider. We further demonstrate that the bias is highly information resistant and persists despite increasing exposure to evidence (2/3)
The German public is more approving of police violence when victims are immigrants, and this bias is highly resistant to new information. This shows our new study published in Science Advances. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... (1/3)
Very much appreciated @alexdukalskis.bsky.social!
Text features and baseline models' predictive performance line charts over 6 time horizons (BBC data, left; CrisisWatch data, right).
Happy to share that my new paper is out in @conflictmanagement.bsky.social
I compare several NLP approaches for conflict prediction:
• conflict dictionaries
• sentiment dictionaries
• word scaling
• dynamic topic models
• specialized transformer models
Spanish PM Sánchez responds to Trump:
"Spain is against this disaster... Govts are here to improve people's lives... It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are unable to fulfill that mission use the smoke of war to hide their failure, and in the process, fill the pockets of a few."
Just arrived: MAKING A CAREER IN DICTATORSHIP.
Featuring original visualizations throughout, the book reconstructs an entire military organization using career data from 15k officers.
A deep dive into how the security apparatus in autocracies really works.
Excited to finally hold it in my hands.
Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, the Sahel region, the United States ...
Want to know why state agents carry out brutal repression — or participate in illegal coups?
Our new book "Making a Career in Dictatorship" provides answers — it just got published by @academic.oup.com:
tinyurl.com/ystwm3tf
Meine Einschätzung zur #Abschiebeoffensive der CSU:
Die geplante Abschiebeoffensive der CSU wäre ein schwerer Fehler mit enormen wirtschaftlichen Kosten für Deutschland und wäre zudem ein Bruch mit dem deutschen Asylrecht.
Thread 1/n
🪙Do economic sanctions negatively affect democracy and human rights in targeted countries?
➡️ @antonpeez.bsky.social re-examines the effects of Western sanctions to improve democracy and human rights from 1990-2021 and finds that negative effects persist www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView
The Geneva Academy has launched War WATCH, a new online portal combining conflict classification (RULAC) and analysis of civilian harm and IHL compliance.
warwatch.ch
"About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024" due mostly to DOGE's illegal dismantling of USAID
📢 New publication alert! 📢
How do countries around the world pursue justice after human rights violations?
This special data feature introduces the Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools (TJET) database, which includes 400+ indicators on transitional justice mechanisms worldwide from 1970 to 2020.
New Publication with @lhaffert.bsky.social in @ejprjournal.bsky.social!
We study the role of generations in the urban-rural divide, which is increasingly shaping the politics of many democracies.
Studying Switzerland, we show: The urban-rural divide is stronger among younger generations. (1/10) 🧵👇
📣 out now, with @argohdes.bsky.social and Mark Gibney - and in honour of the wonderful Steve Poe, who motivated the 1st edition with @universitypress.cambridge.org
tinyurl.com/2s4kh6z3. If you enjoy reading this even a fraction as much as I enjoyed creating it, you’re in for a ride 🤩
Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...
In a new paper, we show that "opportunity moves" foster political integration and shift political preferences to the left.
Please have a look at @valentinaconsiglio.bsky.social's excellent summary for some more details.
👉 tinyurl.com/46utjj65
The course aims to advance these skills with an emphasis on producing publication-ready figures, including high-resolution plots that use color-blind-friendly palettes, to ensure that data-driven evidence is communicated as clearly and inclusively as possible. (7/n)
We might ask whether we still need data visualization training when we have powerful LLMs to help us. Certainly, LLMs can help to optimize our code. But without a profound understanding of the produced code, we run the risk of creating figures that may look nice but that misrepresent our data. (6/n)
In order to create effectively communicate data, we need to understand the inherent biases and dynamics of human visual perceptions. These insights on the fundamentals of data visualization are broadly applicable beyond the field of (social) science. (5/n)
As put by Kieran Healy: "Data visualization is not simply a matter of competing standards of good taste. Some approaches work better for reasons that have less to do with one’s sense of what looks good and more to do with how human visual perception works." (4/n)
Apart from providing code for various figures including cleveland plots, ridgeline plots, or dynamic plots, the class seeks to provide a theoretical foundation. Effective data visualization requires a profound understanding of the dynamics of human visual perception. (3/n)
The course will introduce a variety of data visualization techniques including model-based visualizations, focusing on the effective presentation of empirical results through coefficient plots, simulated expected value plots, and event study plots. (2/n)
I'm very excited to teach this Data Visualization course next week at the German Institute for Global Area Studies (GIGA): lnkd.in/eWBX2EQN (1/n)
