Beyond the TWFE models, we use an instrumental variable strategy, sentiment analysis of the press releases, interviews, and a reconstruction of the Commission's statement on the 2023 repression in Jujuy.

Repeated participation by international NGOs doesn't produce the same effect. Access and familiarity help, but local, context-specific knowledge seems to be what makes the information usable.

Local NGOs that keep showing up at hearings become familiar to Commission staff. When something happens, those NGOs send curated, well-documented information through informal channels, and the Commission is more willing to criticize states.

In the paper, we study the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its press releases over a 25-year period. Press releases are discretionary and weakly institutionalized, which makes them a good window into how IO staff decide what information is credible enough to act on.

Neither coding scheme shows a trend over time. The regime is contested in specific places rather than coming apart across the board. Happy to hear thoughts!

Palestine-Israel and country-specific resolutions are the most fragmented. Rights-based and cooperation topics draw broader coalitions. The BERT model adds Sudan/Central African region (AU bloc vs. Western accountability coalition) and religion/intolerance as polarized clusters.

Topics come from expert coding and from a BERTopic model. The two schemes largely converge, which gives us some confidence in both. Where they diverge, the model recovers divisions that the broader expert categories hide.

Our data are sponsorship records for more than 2,000 HRC resolutions between 2006–2024. Sponsorship is a costlier signal than votes or UPR recommendations. We build yearly networks for each topic and use modularity to capture how much sponsorship concentrates in separate blocs.

The human rights resilience and fragmentation arguments share an assumption: the regime is monolithic. But HRC resolutions range from Palestine-Israel and Sudan to women's rights and international cooperation. There's no reason to expect the same level of agreement across all of them.

New article in @networkscijournal.bsky.social with @jarededgerton.bsky.social and @ccaveros.bsky.social. We ask whether the human rights regime is consolidating or fragmenting, and argue the answer depends on the issue. The paper is open access!

We introduce the first global, geolocated dataset of border wall segments from 1990 to 2020. We combine this spatial data with a new latent variable model of interstate trust to predict not just whether states build walls, but exactly where they build them.

Instead, we argue that unilateral border fortifications are driven by relational factors: a lack of bilateral trust and deficits in a neighbor's state capacity.

Thrilled to announce the publication of "Trust or Fortify? Border Walls in International Relations" in @isq-jrnl.bsky.social, a project with Mike Kenwick and Beth Simmons. In it, we challenge the traditional issue-centric explanations for border walls, like terrorism or migration. 🧵👇