National security vs. human rights: A game theoretic analysis of the tension between these objectives

Aniruddha Bagchi and Jomon A. Paul

European Journal of Operational Research, 2021, vol. 290, issue 2, 790-805

Abstract: We explore why human rights violations take place in the midst of a rebellion. Authoritarian governments may not care for human rights but surprisingly several democratic governments have also condoned such violations. We show that the primary cause of such violations is faulty intelligence. There are two type of defective intelligence that can occur viz., missed alarm and false alarm. We consider each of these cases and determine the optimal human rights standard of the government. We then examine the effect of a decrease in the human rights standard on the probability of quelling the rebellion. In our theoretical model, this effect is indeterminate (i.e. can be positive or negative). We empirically quantify this effect using the case of Armed Forces Special Powers Act in India. Since the probability of quelling the rebellion is not directly observable, we use the magnitude of violence as its indicator. The magnitude of violence should be negatively related to the probability of the government’s success. We find that a lowering of the standard of human rights increases violence (i.e. reduces the chance of quelling the rebellion) and this effect is statistically significant.

Keywords: OR in Defense; Government; Tactics/Strategy; Military; Insurgency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221720307086
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:290:y:2021:i:2:p:790-805

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2020.08.017

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().