Book Manuscript:

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The Power of the Powerless: Why Governments Establish Domestic Reparations Programs

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Journal Articles:

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Limited Contrition: Explaining Systematic Variation in Reparations Payments

Reparations payments are commonly analyzed in binary terms: paid or not paid. This approach causes researchers to miss systematic variation in the incidence of reparations promises and payments versus non-promises and non-payments for certain types of human rights abuses. In this paper, I move to a lower level of analysis to assess the variation in reparations payments based on the type of human rights violation. I do this using my original dataset on reparations, which contains data on nine types of state-sanctioned human rights abuses committed during internal conflicts or dictatorships in Latin America, Europe, and Central Asia between 1939 and 2006. My analysis reveals that reparations promise and payment rates vary from one type of abuse to another, as governments are more likely to offer payment for visible and documentable abuses than for crimes that do not leave tangible marks and whose commission cannot be indisputably proved. I also show how more reparations have been paid since human rights have become an international norm.

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From Paper to Payment: The Uneven Application of Domestic Reparations Laws

After states commit human rights abuses against their own citizens, subsequent governments often draft and pass laws establishing reparations programs that provide money, services, and other measures to victims. Although in most cases these laws are ostensibly objective, thereby meeting international human rights standards, the practical implementation of such laws is often highly subjective. This paper examines the ways in which domestic politicians, bureaucrats, and courts interpret and enact reparations laws in partisan ways in order to maintain and accumulate political capital with domestic interest groups. It offers qualitative evidence from case studies in postwar Germany and postwar Croatia, including data from elite interviews, to show how governments draft laws that meet international standards, as well as how bureaucrats and courts then interpret and apply these laws in discriminatory ways that shield the political elite from domestic backlash over awarding reparations to unpopular minority groups.

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Identity & Implementation: The Effect of Victim Ethnicity on Reparations Policy

Research on conflict processes has begun to examine how violent episodes and post-conflict reconciliation efforts affect different groups of people in different ways. Although there is a great deal of research on how ethnic identity shapes experiences of conflict, less attention has been paid to how ethnic identity shapes transitional justice experiences. This is particularly true of generalizable findings on how ethnicity influences the likelihood of receiving reparations. This paper examines how ethnic identity interacts with reparations and utilizes an original reparations dataset to show that ethnic identity does affect reparations outcomes. This differentiation does not occur in the extent to which governments make reparations promises and/or payments, but rather in how long it takes to pass and comply with reparations laws. While ethnic minorities receive reparations promises and payments at rates similar to ethnic majorities, it generally takes ethnic minority groups longer to receive promises and payments.