Right or Robust? The Sensitive Nature of Repression to Globalization

A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that globalization promotes government repression of human rights: the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, or extra-judicial killing of citizens, activists, or dissidents by state security forces under the control of ruling state elites. This article employs a variant of Extreme Bounds Analysis in order to analyze the robustness of this growing body of important but contradictory inferences. It argues that (1) we can make robust empirical claims about the relationship between certain trade and investment indicators and government repression, but shows that (2) cumulative knowledge across studies nevertheless remains limited by the sensitivity of many indicators to conditioning sets of information. This problem stems from vaguely specified theoretical mechanisms linking economic processes to government repression and is of potentially great consequence for scholarship seeking to explain the causes of human rights violations, in particular, and the effects of economic globalization, in general.