ABSTRACT
In order to discern why human rights abuse occurs, and why patterns of abuse change over time, scholars and advocates alike must seek to understand both the internal and external factors affecting situations of abuse. While the existing literature on state repression has dealt extensively with the internal variables associated with human rights abuse, this research has contributed to existing theories by incorporating themes of international influence, historical context, and long-term processes of change in human rights abuse patterns. Because this research has approached abuse patterns from a qualitative perspective, it has also been able to analyze the ways in which abuse strategies shift in subtle ways over time, often times becoming more covert. These contributions have enabled the development of new theoretical concepts, along with the refinement of existing concepts, that can be used to better understand change in human rights abuse patterns, and which can be used to inform advocacy strategies seeking to minimize, or put an end to, human rights abuse.
