Pro-government miltias and repressive violence against the free press
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2019-08-01
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
Governments around the globe maintain relationships with Pro-Government militias (PGMs) This
behaviour is often explained with the Delegation argument. The argument states that governments
have a need to avoid accountability for human rights violations. Governments therefore delegate
certain shameful acts, such as repressive violence against journalists, to PGMs in order to avoid
accountability. One could therefore expect that official security forces wont participate in acts of
repression, if governments delegate these acts to PGMs in order to avoid accountability.
I test this assumption with a comparative case study based on two cases, Venezuela and
Iraq. The comparative case study is based on news media articles and NGO reports retrieved via
LexisNexis. The findings show that militia violence against journalists cannot fully be explained by
the Delegation argument. Instead, I turn to the concept of violence repertoires as a complementary
explanations Links between PGMs and governments as well as militia violence against journalists
can therefore be seen as the result of path dependency and routine behaviour.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen