Pressures, Promises, and Payments: Explaining Governments’ Reparations Decisions after Domestic Human Rights Abuses

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  • July 24, 2019
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  • Greenstein, Claire
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
Abstract
  • After governments commit human rights abuses against their own citizens, what motivates those governments (or their successors) to promise and pay reparations? In this dissertation, I combine insights from the literatures on transitional justice, democratization, and social movements to create the first generalizable theory explaining the motivations behind governments’ reparations decisions. I argue that governments promise and pay reparations due to the efforts of strong, pro-reparations victims’ rights organizations. I use a mixed-methods approach to support this argument. In Chapter 1, I introduce my theory about why governments promise and pay reparations to domestic victims of severe, government-sanctioned human rights abuses. In Chapter 2, I provide quantitative evidence for my argument by analyzing my original dataset on reparations promises and payments. This dataset records the domestic reparations outcomes for 180 cases of internal conflicts and dictatorships in Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia from 1939 to 2006. Using this data, I find that strength of pro-reparations victims’ organizations has a meaningful and statistically significant influence on reparations outcomes. Chapters 3-5 consist of three separate qualitative case studies that allow me to process-trace governments’ reparations decisions over time. In these chapters, I present qualitative data that I gathered in fieldwork conducted in Germany and Peru from 2015 to 2017 to examine the motivations behind the West German government’s reparations promises and payments to Jewish German citizens after the Holocaust, the West German government’s reparations promises and payments to Romani German citizens after WWII, and the Peruvian government’s reparations promises and payments to Peruvian citizens who were harmed in Peru’s 1980-2000 Armed Internal Conflict. Drawing on personal interviews, archival documents, primary sources, and selected secondary literature, I show that the efforts of victims’ organizations are the central factor in explaining the reparations outcomes in my three case studies.
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Advisor
  • Ballard-Rosa, Cameron
  • Hooghe, Liesbet
  • Robertson, Graeme B
  • Vachudova, Milada A
  • Stephens, John D
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2019

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