This article explores how social media acted as a catalyst for protest mobilization during the Tunisian revolution in late 2010 and early 2011. Using evidence from protests we argue that social media acted as an important resource for popular mobilization against the Ben Ali regime. Drawing on insights from “resource mobilization theory”, we show that social media (1) allowed a “digital elite” to break the national media blackout through brokering information for mainstream media; (2) provided a basis for intergroup collaboration for a large “cycle of protest”; (3) reported event magnitudes that raised the perception of success for potential free riders, and (4) provided additional “emotional mobilization” through depicting the worst atrocities associated with the regime's response to the protests. These findings are based on background talks with Tunisian bloggers and digital activists and a revealed preference survey conducted among a sample of Tunisian internet users (February–May 2012).

This paper demonstrates why human rights measurement is important, how human rights have been measured to date, and how such measures can be improved in the future. Through focusing primarily but not exclusively on the measurement of civil and political rights, the paper argues that human rights can be measured in principle, in practice, and as outcomes of government policy. Such measures include the coding of formal legal documents, events-based, standards-based, and survey-based data, as well as aggregate indicators that serve as indirect measures of rights protection. The paper concludes by stressing the need for continued provision of high quality information at the lowest level of aggregation, sharing information and developing an ethos of replication, and long term investment in data collection efforts.

This article provides an initial assessment of the many risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic on the conduct of genuine and transparent elections in the world. It begins with explaining why elections are a vital part of democracy, and then using the notion of the electoral cycle, constructs a risk matrix that assesses the relative impact and likelihood of risks to the cycle, as well as proposes a number of potential mitigations to these risks. The variety and number of elections, dimensions of the electoral cycle that can be disrupted, and the need for solutions raises significant questions about the future of democracy itself.

The subject of international human rights … projects liberalism into a realist world – a world dominated for several centuries by states and their collective interests. Global politics in the post Cold War and post-9/11 era has seen many achievements and challenges for the promotion and protection of human rights. The rise in the number of states embracing, at least formally, the body of international human rights law that has proliferated since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has continued. After the collapse of the Soviet Union newly independent states in the former communist ...

Human rights have long been a direct or indirect substantive topic in modern political science and, in particular, the study of human rights represents an important nexus between traditional concerns within comparative politics and those in international relations. On the one hand, comparative politics has traditionally been concerned with the functions, determinants and outcomes of different political regimes, political institutions, political culture, the relationship between states and citizens (protest and repression, social mobilization and citizenship rights, voting, elections and party systems), and large social processes such as social and political revolutions, democratization and the domestic effects of and responses to globalization. On the other hand, international relations has concentrated on the inter-state dynamics of war, peace and security; international trade, finance and development; the growth and role of international organizations; the proliferation and effectiveness of international regimes and foreign policy analysis. More recently, attention has focused on the interplay between domestic and international politics in examining the ways in which domestic political arrangements may have an impact on the international behaviour of states. The now famous notion of the ‘two-level’ game has been instructive for scholars examining the constraint of democratic institutions on state behaviour, while the large literature on the ‘democratic’ and ‘Kantian’ peace has used the tools of modern political science to examine the degree to which democracy and other ‘liberal’ variables have an inhibiting effect on the likelihood of interstate violence. The study of human rights within modern political science fits neatly into these disciplinary developments. The history of human rights is one of the increasing internationalization of an idea that has traditionally been defended nationally.