Expanded accountability?: human rights and environmental protection practices

Alison Grace Cliath

doi:10.7273/000005703

This dissertation is written in a three article format, consisting of three journal length papers preceded by an introductory chapter. Each manuscript poses questions of expanded accountability and contributes to understanding the sometimes mutual, sometimes contradictory relationship of social justice and ecological improvements. The first manuscript examines human rights practices and elaborates the image of nation-states as internationally pulled and domestically pushed to protect human rights, to highlight when states might ignore such calls. I investigate the School of Americas (SOA), a United States training program for military officers from nations throughout Latin America, and its relationship to human rights practices. To test hypotheses about external influences informed by neo-institutionalism and the geopolitical perspective, I conduct event history analyses of the human rights practices of 17 Latin American countries eligible to receive SOA training, 1976-2005. Results show clearly that SOA training impedes improved human rights practices and prompts differential susceptibility to the international pull and domestic push to improve human rights practices. The second manuscript examines the impact of SOA training on extraconstitutional violence in Latin America between 1955 and 2005 and contributes to theoretical understanding of the state in the context of globalization. Results of event history analyses indicate that SOA training contributed to the onset of state violence, and these atrocities were more likely to occur in the late Cold War period. Dominant theories of the state rely on a duality of the nation-state and the global, and these theories assume that states are equally sovereign. In documenting the importance of processes operating on a regional scale, especially the geopolitical agenda of the United States, this research challenges this duality. The final manuscript explores the potential of conscientious consumption to reshape how social and environmental relationships are represented, regulated, seen, and experienced in a capitalist economy. In analyzing labeling as a technology, I explore the ability to distinguish labels signifying real social and environmental improvements from industry blue/greenwash. Using the techniques of visual sociology in a grounded-theorystyle investigation of a variety of supermarket-available blue/green products, I identify and test five strategies to see shades.

Expanded accountability?: human rights and environmental protection practices

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