Examining Extrajudicial Killings: Discriminant Analyses of Human Rights’ Violations

Extrajudicial killings are cases where a government kills citizens with no judicial oversight. We offer first-of-its-kind analyses of this phenomenon that by now is widely discussed in the context of international politics. The theoretical framework proposed here underscores the importance of two pillars: an independent judiciary and violent conflicts. Ordered logistic regression models and GEE time-series cross-sectional analyses with data for 146 countries from 1981–2004 lend support to our theory. Furthermore, the analyses compare extrajudicial killings as a political phenomenon with other phenomena they are often associated with or even lumped together with in empirical analyses. Those include political imprisonment and political disappearance. We find that in various ways extrajudicial killings are indeed unique.