Kosovo 1981 Issue Resolved

Our webmaster has resolved the aforementioned issue with the Kosovo 1981 country-year, so there should be no more need to manually remove those 0s from the dataset. Thanks for bearing with us on this! Sincerely, The CIRI Team

Kosovo 1981

We are experiencing a technical glitch where the server is replacing blanks (no data) with 0s for the row of Kosovo, 1981. We're working on remedying this, but pleased be advised for the moment to remove those 0s from the dataset before analysis. Sincerely, The CIRI Team

Please Support our CIRI Human Rights Education Initiative

Starting this fall with the release of our soon-to-be-announced web features, CIRI will be beginning a series of human rights-education initiatives. For the first of these endeavors, we are attempting funding via crowd-sourcing. 

If you are able to contribute, or know anyone that can, we'd certainly appreciate your support. If this initial project succeeds, we have a host of exciting further ideas for promoting human rights education in high schools.

A campaign abstract is below. You can contribute via Paypal or other means at our crowd-sourcing website: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ciri-human-rights-education-initiative/x/3817227

For your contribution, you can probably receive some free CIRI swag, maybe immortality on our website, but most-definitely our eternal thanks and the knowledge of doing some good by raising knowledge/awareness of human rights!

Summary of Campaign

The goal of the CIRI Human Rights Education Initiative is to produce human rights-based lesson plans for use in high school classrooms. Funds will be used to pay an advanced Ph.D. student to work with high school social science teachers under the supervision of CIRI Co-Director Dr. David L. Richards to develop human rights-based lesson plans during the summer of 2014.These lesson plans will be made freely available on the CIRI website.
The lesson plans will engage students with questions such as:

• What are human rights?
• Which human rights are most-respected and/or violated by governments around the world, and why?
• How can we compare countries' respect for human rights both across geography and over time?
• What can be done to better-protect human rights?
• What is the state of human rights in the USA?

By using CIRI data to address many of these questions, students will also learn and hone crucial evidence-based/critical thinking as well as quantitative-based comparative and comprehension skills.

What We Need & What You Get

Our campaign total is based on: (1) the cost of a half-time graduate research assistant for one summer (77% of total funds requested for campaign); (2) expenses related to working with high school teachers on lesson creation; (3) web-based distribution costs; (3) miscellaneous supplies.

The Impact

The goal of the CIRI project is greater respect for human rights fueled by greater awareness of human rights, and we can't think of a better starting point than the high school classroom. Human rights education has come a long way at colleges -- to the point where it is now a major of its own. However, human rights on its own is just a budding subject in high schools. By combining a data-based approach with human rights education, the CIRI Initiative's lesson plans will meet dual needs: topical coverage of human rights and an introduction to quantitative comparison/analysis and evidence-based decision making. 

2011 Data Update, 2012 Data Update, Manual Update, Surprise

Hi,

We have four things of note to share:

1. Work has been underway on the 2011 data. We hope to have those data uploaded for public access in late July or early August. We'll post updates here on the blog as things unfold.

2. This coming fall, we'll be working on the 2012 data.  We hope to have those data uploaded for public access in January. We'll post updates here on the blog as things unfold.

3. This summer, we'll be releasing an updated version of our coding manual. The update reflects improvements over the last several years in how we train our coders.

4. Keep an eye out on this blog and on the CIRI website this year for a major addition to what we offer our users.

Sincerely,
CIRI

A Lesson in Falsifiability for “Senator No”

In 2009, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) used the CIRI Human Rights Data Project (www.humanrightsdata.org), as one reason among others to argue for ceasing National Science Foundation funding for political science research. He did not succeed then, but he will undoubtedly succeed in 2013, given the recent Senate and House passages of the Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, containing this language. His amendment to this bill will block approximately $10 million of NSF funding for political science research from being used, except for that research which the Director of the NSF certifies is in the interest of the United States’ economy or security. Coburn’s 2009 comments about the CIRI project persist in recent coverage of this week’s news about the passage of the appropriations bill.

Interestingly, the situation in which we currently find ourselves provides an opportunity to teach the Senator a basic scientific concept: falsifiability. In essence, Senator Coburn has made a $10 million hypothesis (educated guess) that his enumerated reasons for cutting NSF funding of political science research are sound. Unlike in the world of science where hypotheses must meet evidence and findings must pass peer review, however, the Senator does not have to expose his hypothesis to systematic scrutiny. We can do that here, however.

The CIRI Human Rights Data Project provides annual numeric ratings of the level of government respect for 15 internationally-recognized human rights in 195 countries, including the United States. With funds from the NSF, in 2004 we launched a website that allows users to download these scores for free. The majority of NSF funds went to our many graduate and undergraduate student assistants. Currently, CIRI data are used in approximately 170 countries by governments, international organizations, researchers, activists, businesses and, increasingly, students. 

Senator Coburn leveled explicit criticism at the CIRI project because we purportedly “concluded that the United States has been ‘increasingly willing to torture enemy combatants and imprison suspected terrorists,’ leading to a worldwide increase in ‘human rights violations’ as others followed-suit.” 

That is false, Senator, on two counts:

First, the CIRI project only codes what governments do to their own citizens. What governments do to enemy and non-citizen combatants are not included in the CIRI dataset. This has been made clear for anyone who takes the trouble to read our data-creation guidelines, which have been freely accessible online since August 2004. 

Second, whether other governments follow the lead of the US in the use of torture is a causal research question. The CIRI project provides data about respect for human rights; we do not, as an organization, test causal research questions. The NSF money CIRI has received has gone towards data creation and distribution, not the investigation of whether other countries are more prone to use torture should the USA do so first. What Senator Coburn’s statement about CIRI is based upon is a quote from David Cingranelli in a news item from December 2008, not anything relating to the CIRI project’s data or its funding.

So, to the extent NSF funding for the CIRI Human Rights Data Project has weighed in his decision, Senator Coburn has threatened $10 million of federal funds for political science research based on an easily falsifiable premise. Cutting millions of dollars of valuable social science research based on a patently false supposition about the world is deplorable and unwise. 

If the Senator is opposed to CIRI’s mission of providing data to help provide a life of dignity to persons worldwide, it would be honorable to be straightforward about that rather than engaging in mischaracterizations in order to be seen as protecting the US citizenry from the wasteful funding of projects which purportedly denigrate the United States without reason. 

Finally, a special mention for Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who was willing to go along with Coburn's language because she thinks the "national security" and "national economy" loopholes are big enough such that no research will actually be declined by NSF. That's a dangerously tunnel-visioned  of research such that it all fits into one or both of two boxes. It also bends to the Bush-era winds that national security (defined as military expenditure and intervention) is the only important factor in this world -- a point of view antithetical to the very notion of human rights itself.

-David L. Richards

Up & Running

It appears the CIRI website is back up and running at full functionality. We are grateful to our users for their patience and understanding during the outage.

Best,
All of us at CIRI

Service Interruption

Dear CIRI Users,

We apologize for today's service interruption. Apparently our DNS provider, Directnic, took us offline by assigning two IP addresses to our website. Thus, access as of this point is random.

If you can't access CIRI, please hit up Directnic on Twitter and/or Facebook. and tell them to pay some attention to Trouble Ticket TT#2031436.

They haven't responded to our entreaties, so maybe they'll move if they get some more hits about the issue.

Best,
CIRI