The impact of human rights prosecutions on intrastate conflict termination
Description
According to the conventional wisdom of the peace vs. justice debate, the pursuit of justice often stands at odds with peace. However, such conceptions of justice tend to be simplistic, vague, and incomplete. Moreover, they do not account for the vast array of ways in which justice is often manifested in conflicts. This thesis argues that human rights prosecutions during conflict are both improperly understood in the intrastate conflict literature and in the context of justice mechanisms as a whole. Beyond identifying a significant gap in the literature on the impacts of such prosecutions during conflicts, this thesis proposes that only in disaggregating instances of prosecutions can the inquiry into their impact on conflict outcomes be furthered. Accordingly, multinomial logit models are used to examine the extent to which the identities of the prosecutors and targets of those prosecutions have a bearing on the type of conflict termination observed. The findings of these models reveal that the prosecutions of state actors during a conflict are associated with an increased likelihood of that conflict terminating with a peace agreement. This thesis has shown that when targeting actors in a conflict specifically, prosecutions may actually prevent retrenchment and intractability, which the peace vs justice paradigm predicts for the pursuit of such justice mechanisms. Instead, the pursuit of justice, characterized here by human rights prosecutions during intrastate conflict, does not serve as a barrier to a peaceful termination of those conflicts. In fact, it appears that these prosecutions may contribute to these conflicts ending with a peace agreement.