School of influence: Human rights challenges in US foreign military training

Abstract

Can military training decrease human rights violations by security forces? The case of foreign military training is a complicated one because often the aim of the training itself is to address human rights violations. In this paper I explore whether US military training is effective in promoting respect for human rights in the recipient country. States that receive human rights-focused military training and education only see an improvement in respect for human rights by members of security forces in very limited cases. I use global data as well as newly-coded data from a Latin America sample to evaluate this proposal empirically.