The Effect of US Troop Deployments on Human Rights

Abstract

US noninvasion troops deployed abroad often try to promote greater respect for human rights in the host country. The host country, having an incentive to retain the troop presence, may choose to comply with these requests. We argue that this effect will not be at play in states with high security salience for the United States (US) (for which the US may not be able to credibly threaten to remove the troops). In these cases, US deployments will provide the leader with security from both internal and external threats that is independent of the local population’s support for the leader. Host state leaders thus become less reliant on (and potentially less responsive to) their local populations, which in turn may lead to increased human rights violations. In this article, we use data on both US troop deployments abroad and on human rights violations to test these arguments from 1982 to 2005.

Keywords

human rights foreign policy foreign policy decision-making foreign aid

Introduction

In the post–World War II era, the US has engaged in a foreign policy action that has rarely been seen out of a colonial context: the peacetime stationing of its troops on foreign territory (Schmidt 2014). This military presence has proven useful in expanding US influence, but as a relatively new foreign policy tool, many of its implications remain untested. For the host states, the presence of another sovereign state’s military within its borders may have large social, economic, and political effects. In particular, this article focuses on the effect of the US’s noncombat troop deployments on the human rights practices of the governments of their host states.

On one hand, there are anecdotal reasons to suspect that the presence of US troops leads to better human rights practices by the host government. Since 1978, the US government has been required to consider the human rights practices of recipient states when making decisions about continued US security assistance (Forsythe 1987).¹ This requirement has only become more stringent with the 1997 addition of Section 620M, that is, the “Leahy Amendment,” to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (Leahy 2014; US Department of State 2014). The training classes held at the US Department of Defense’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formerly known as the School of the Americas, now include a class on human rights as part of an overarching Democracy and Human Rights Program (WHISC 2014). US military personnel are increasingly informed of their human rights obligations in the field; for instance, the required CAPSTONE course for all new general and flag officers in the US military includes a human rights awareness component (CAPSTONE 2013, 2014).

Further, interviews conducted by one of the authors of this article with a member of the US Army tasked with the training of military officers in sub-Saharan Africa confirm that the promotion of human rights is integrated into the training of the host state’s forces (Errington 2014). The interviews were conducted with the US Army’s Second Brigade of the First Infantry Division in, Fort Riley, KS, home to the first regionally aligned force for Africa. Its soldiers are expected to carry out a variety of missions in several African states, ranging from embassy protection to humanitarian exercises (Schmitt 2012). An interview with the Brigade’s Executive Officer revealed that training for African troops involves courses on how to deal with civilians and on the proper procedure to follow when they encounter human rights violations, as defined by United Nations (UN) standards. He stated that the Americans incorporate human rights into all aspects of training. For example, when teaching students how to identify targets, human rights concerns are discussed. In some field exercises, they will have an entire village work as role players and then ask soldiers to interact with them in a manner that is in accordance with the UN regulations. Under the academic portion of the training, human rights are taught by intentionally presenting students with scenarios that explore gray areas of international human rights standards, which allows the instructors to observe students’ thought processes and update the sort of training that they give (Errington 2014).

As an illustration of the potential positive effects of this kind of interaction between the American and host country troops, the Brigade’s executive officer recounted an anecdote from his time stationed in Guinea. He said that when the American forces first arrived, they noticed that the Guinean soldiers, when riding military convoys through civilian populated areas, would expect civilians to always yield to them and move out of their way. He noted that when they went through towns, the soldiers driving the vehicles would constantly honk their horns to signal the civilians that they should move. The American officer interviewed noted that one noticeable and positive effect of the American presence and training in Guinea was that by the end of their deployment, the Guinean soldiers no longer behaved in this aggressive manner while driving through civilian areas (Errington 2014).

Although this is anecdotal, there is clearly potential for US troop deployments to positively affect respect for human rights in their host countries. At the same time, there are also good reasons to suspect that US troop influence and presence may actually reduce government respect for human rights in host states. Regardless of the efforts of the actual troops present or of human rights limitations on US military assistance, when it comes to the decision makers in the US, human rights have been, at most, a secondary concern in the distribution of that assistance (e.g., Apodaca and Stohl 1999) and US arms transfers (Blanton 2005). The training programs at the School of the Americas and WHISC have long been the target for skepticism and criticism from human rights advocates (e.g., School of the Americas [SOA] Watch 2014), and there is some evidence that, among attendees of the School of the Americas, those who attended more classes are more likely to have been implicated in human rights abuses (McCoy 2005). Indeed, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, both the US and many of its allies appear to have decreased their respect for at least some human rights (Goderis and Versteeg 2012).

In this article, we argue that it may be possible to explain both perspectives via an overarching theory of US troop deployment and host state respect for human rights. Specifically, we focus on physical integrity rights, that is, “the entitlements individuals have in international law to be free from arbitrary physical harm and coercion by their government” (Cingranelli and Richards 1999, 407). In the pages that follow, we argue that, when the host state is less salient to overarching US security interests, the presence of US troops can actually lead to better physical integrity rights practices. However, when the host state is more central to broad US military interests, these positive effects disappear. Overall, we find support for this argument using a data set that covers troop deployments and government respect for physical integrity rights from 1982 to 2005.

The Consequences of US Troop Deployments

What does the existing research tell us about the consequences of US troop deployments for host state policies and political and economic conditions? Previous work examining the deployment of troops as a foreign policy instrument has found that the deployment of US foreign troops can have a beneficial effect on the host country. In particular, existing research demonstrates that the presence of US troops may serve to improve the host state’s economy. Despite the fact that troops are often deployed to unstable regions, the presence of US troops provides a security umbrella that makes US investors, who otherwise would be wary of committing resources to a dangerous region, feel like their investments are protected. Thus, there will be an increase in foreign direct investment to the host state as well as trade with it (Biglaiser and DeRouen 2007, 2009). These flows in trade and investment may then lead to economic growth in the host state (Jones and Kane 2012).

Jones and Kane (2012) argue that US troop presence leads to greater economic growth of the host in part through the diffusion of economic institutions via the American troops. Specifically, they argue that “the presence of U.S. troops involves cross-cultural exposure, and that means that the U.S. standards of law, property, human rights, and respect for human dignity are inevitably on display” (p. 242). The assumption that follows is that the host nation will choose to internalize these norms, presumably with the intent of having them lead to greater economic growth.

Other work has found that the presence of US troops may not always lead to beneficial consequences or at least not consequences that are desired by the US. For example, Martinez Machain and Morgan (2013) find that states that are hosts to US troops are more likely to reduce their own troop levels, while relying on US troops to provide security. Likewise, property-related crime may increase in some host states when US troops are present (Allen and Flynn 2013). Sex work is often associated with American military presences, and along with it come problems such as forced sex labor and abuse and violence against the local sex workers (Lutz 2009; Höhn and Moon 2010; Yeo 2011). Other work has suggested that an American military presence may have negative cultural effects on the host country, promoting ideas of American cultural superiority and affecting social relations among the local population (Höhn and Moon 2010). Further, American bases may lead to environmental degradation and the pollution of soil, air, and water with lead, fuel, and other contaminants (Lutz 2009; Yeo 2011). Even the expected economic benefits of an American troop presence may be offset by increased prices of land and products caused by high American spending in the area. This inflation can lead to locals no longer being able to afford living in their homes (Lutz 2009).

In addition, states that are hosts to US troops may be more likely to engage in bellicose behavior, initiating more militarized disputes (Martinez Machain and Morgan 2013) and (in the case of North Atlantic Treaty Organization states) increasing their levels of defense spending (Allen, Flynn, and VanDusky-Allen 2014). Beyond this behavior, some have argued that hosting these troops associates a state with the US, potentially making the host state a target of attack from actors hostile to the US (Lutz 2009).

US Troop Deployments and Human Rights

As the above discussion demonstrates, US troop deployments are likely to yield both costs and benefits for host states. Likewise, we suspect that the relationship between troop deployments and human rights is more complicated than one in which US troops always lead to improvements or declines in respect for such rights. As such, in the following discussion, we develop a theory that serves to reconcile the existing popular arguments, mentioned in the introduction, that relate US troop deployments to improved or diminished respect for human rights. Overall, we argue that, when the presence of US troops is of greater importance to the host state than to the US, deployments are likely to lead to improvements in the physical integrity rights practices of the host state. However, in situations when the host state is more central or salient to overarching US foreign policy objectives, this relationship may disappear or even reverse. In addition, we consider the evolution of the emphasis placed on human rights training by the US armed forces, expecting greater improvements in the physical integrity rights practices of the host state in the post–Cold War era.

Why might we expect the noncombat presence of US troops to lead to improved host state respect for physical integrity rights? First, when the US deploys training missions abroad, it is often done with the explicit expectation that those missions will positively influence the host state’s domestic security apparatus. As discussed previously, when US forces engage in the training of foreign troops, respect for human rights is taught alongside the traditional tactical and strategic training one might expect from a military training force (Errington 2014). Overall, such training missions attempt to alter the host state military’s overall norms of behavior in such a way that they become more effective while simultaneously displaying better respect for the human rights of their civilian populations. As the US Army has expressed in its publications, when promoting a “hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency, respect for human rights may go hand in hand with military effectiveness (US Army 2009). Thus, we might expect the presence of US troops to directly alter human rights norms in the host state such that the violation of human rights becomes a less acceptable tactic overall.

That said, such training does not accompany all noncombat deployments of US troops, and we do not necessarily expect host state agents to adopt better respect for physical integrity rights simply because such respect may be displayed by American troops. However, there are other reasons why governments may choose to restrict the repressive activities of their agents as a result of a US troop presence. In particular, we expect this to occur for two different reasons.

First, when the host state is less salient to overarching US interests, the host government may fear the removal of the American troops and, thus, the loss of any benefits (such as security provided by the US troops, and the freeing up of resources that is accompanied by that security) associated with those troops’ presence.² For example, in his case studies on Bolivia and Colombia, Laurienti (2007) concluded that one of the main reasons why these two states accept American human rights promotion within their militaries is to keep military assistance provided to them by the US. When the host state is not central to US security objectives, it makes little sense for the American government to pay the many costs of being associated with a human rights violator via troop deployments. As discussed previously, the US government has increasingly tied its foreign policy decision-making process to human rights concerns. Indeed, much of the information presented previously suggests that, all else being equal, the US would prefer foreign militaries to demonstrate greater respect for human rights. If a US troop presence is largely seen as providing military assistance to the host state internationally, maintaining such a presence could be seen as a direct violation of this principle, as well as of US law, which prohibits providing such assistance to human rights violators.

Second, in their efforts to improve global respect for human rights, international advocacy networks are likely to target relationships between major democracies like the US and states that benefit from hosting US troops within their borders (Keck and Sikkink 1998). As such, if the host state engages in widespread violations of physical integrity rights, the US may face significant international and domestic pressure to either remove its troops or leverage its power over the host state to force better respect for physical integrity. If the host state is less important to US security objectives or if it is easily replaced by another potential host government that lacks such negative international attention, there is little reason for the US to continue to deploy troops to a state that is primarily generating international publicity costs for the US government.

Taken together, these two points imply that the presence of US troops may alter the host state’s incentive structure. Previous to the US troop deployment, the host state may very well have utilized repression as a strategy for dealing with internal demands and threats. However, after deployment as part of a noninvasion force, the US troops serve to provide additional security for the host state (Martinez Machain and Morgan 2013). Assuming that the host state’s preferences over security do not change, US troop presence frees up resources that the state would have otherwise used for security (Morgan and Palmer 2000; Palmer and Morgan 2011; Martinez Machain and Morgan 2013). Given that the US might pull its troops from states that are not central to US security objectives, if those states are producing publicity and other costs that the US would prefer to avoid, the host state suddenly has a greater incentive to reduce its use of physical integrity rights abuse in an effort to remain a viable location for US troop deployment. Thus, the host state has an incentive to alter its human rights behavior in order to preserve the added benefits provided by such a deployment. Overall, this leads us to posit:

Hypothesis 1: In states that are less salient to US security concerns, as the number of noninvasion US troops increases, respect for physical integrity rights by the host state government will increase.

However, as suggested throughout the above discussion, there is good reason to suspect that the mechanism discussed previously changes when the host state’s salience to US security interests is higher.³ For example, existing arguments suggest that, during the Cold War era, the US’s concern for fighting Communism overshadowed its human rights goals (Laurienti 2007). Indeed, Blanton (2005) demonstrates that human rights concerns had no effect on US arms transfers during the Cold War. While there were certainly reforms made in the post–Cold War era, there is reason to believe that security salience overriding human rights promotion was not purely a Cold War phenomenon and may have in fact varied during the Cold War. Also, while Communism may have ceased to be a major threat after the Cold War, there remained many other security concerns for the US in the post–Cold War era. After the Cold War, the human rights practices of recipient states did directly affect a state’s eligibility to receive arms from the US, but those practices were still not as important as security interests in determining the overall distribution of those arms. Previous studies on US economic and military aid have often found that, while the recipient state’s human rights practices affect the distribution of US foreign aid, those practices are of secondary concern compared to the importance of security and economic interests (e.g., Lebovic 1988; Poe 1992; Blanton 1994; Apodaca and Stohl 1999; Demirel-Pegg and Moscowitz 2009). Taken together, these previous findings suggest that, while human rights concerns may very well affect US foreign policy decision-making, they are usually less important in those decisions than overall US security and economic interests.

Overall, the variation that exists in host states’ importance for US security interests will affect the likelihood that we observe the positive effect of US troops on host state human rights practices posited above. While the US may very well be willing to respond to host state human rights violations by removing its troops from host states that are of low security salience, we suspect that the US is much less likely to remove troops from states that are key to US security, for example, states that provide access to crucial conflict areas. Even if the US prefers that the hosts of its troop deployments not violate human rights, the US has demonstrated a willingness to continue providing military aid to states that have high security salience, even when those states have bad human rights records or engage in nondemocratic practices (Martinez Machain and Oestman 2014). If the US is less likely to remove troops from a place that has greater security salience, the high salience host state’s costs of repression, even in light of US pressure to desist, are likely to be much lower than the host states of lower security salience to the US. As a result, in locations that are more strategically important to the US, we expect any positive effect of the US troop presence to be muted.⁴

Hypothesis 2: As US security salience rises, US troop deployments’ effect on the host state respect for physical integrity rights decreases.

In fact, governments that are crucial to US security interests may increase their level of human rights abuses after receiving a large deployment of US troops. A growing number of studies have found that governments that rely heavily on nontax revenues, such as those derived from foreign aid and natural resource wealth, tend to engage in higher levels of human rights abuse (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2010; Cingranelli, Fajardo-Heyward, and Filippov 2014; DeMeritt and Young 2013). States that rely heavily on taxes for income need to encourage their citizens to engage in economically productive activity and maintain a less adversarial relationship with their citizenry. In general, a reliance on nontax revenues serves to disconnect the government’s needs from the economic prosperity and productivity of its citizens. As such, states that rely heavily on nontax revenues face fewer costs from engaging in human rights abuses.

Similar to nontax revenues, the security that US troops provide is exogenous to the host state’s relationship to its population, as the government does not have to rely on its citizens (or their tax money) to provide this security. Even more directly, the host states will most often receive rent payments for the use of their facilities when they are hosting US troops. Some of these payments take the form of actual rent payments (particularly when a more permanent base is set up in the host country) and others are framed as aid packages that may include economic or military aid. Whether these payments take the form of direct cash transfers or increases in aid, they increase the amount of nontax income available to the host state’s government (Cooley 2008a, 2008b). If the state is important to US security interests, it is unlikely that the US will be willing to remove its troops (and the payments associated with them), even after high levels of human rights abuses by the host state, for all of the reasons laid out above.⁵ As such, a large deployment of US troops to such a state may permanently alter the government’s incentive to repress, reducing the cost of engaging in physical integrity rights abuses by reducing the state’s reliance on their citizens and indirectly increasing their coercive resources (Lutz 2009). Thus, by this logic, we might expect that the leaders of states that are of high importance to US security interests will display reduced respect for physical integrity rights in the aftermath of a US troop deployment.⁶

Hypothesis 3: At high levels of US security salience, the presence of US troops will be associated with decreased respect for physical integrity rights.

We also need to consider the possibility that any differences in the effects of troop deployments on human rights might be driven by the more explicit codification of human rights concerns in US military training after the Cold War. While some of today’s field-grade officers may express that human rights training has always been a part of their military training, human rights issues were only made central to the US military in the last twenty-five years, when some of today’s lieutenant colonels were only just beginning their military careers (Errington 2015; Laurienti 2007). As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the US saw less of a need to support autocratic regimes that were egregious human rights violators but were also fighting leftist opponents. Without the Soviet Union providing support to leftist movements around the world, the US was no longer in a situation where it had to face a trade-off between fighting Communism and promoting human rights (Laurienti 2007).

With the Cold War coming to an end and human rights groups (such as the previously mentioned SOA Watch established in 1990) exposing misdoings by the American-trained military officers in places such as Latin America, the US military faced a potential public relations crisis. It responded through actions such as discontinuing and recalling SOA manuals that taught torture tactics to foreign military officers (in 1992), establishing a SOUTHCOM (Southern Command) Human Rights office (in 1995), launching its Human Rights Initiative (in 1997) to include representatives from the military, civilian government, and civilian society to develop military human rights programs, and passing SOUTHCOM Regulation 1–20 (in 1998) which requires all personnel assigned to SOTUHCOM to take human rights awareness education and report all suspected violations of human rights (Laurienti 2007; US Southern Command 2015).⁷

If the US military did not start incorporating human rights into its military training until after the Cold War, we might expect the positive effect of a US troop presence on a host state’s respect for physical integrity rights to be greater in the post–Cold War era. This is because, as we have previously argued, one major reason for increased respect for physical integrity rights in the host state is the direct training on human rights that the host state’s military may receive from the US. If this training was not provided before 1991, we should not expect to see a significant effect on the host state before that. In addition, it was only in the post–Cold War era that the US began to move away from the trade-off between fighting Communism and promoting human rights, meaning that it would be much less likely to overlook human rights violations if there was no longer a significant leftist threat in a host state. This suggests that, regardless of variation in security salience, troop presence will have no effect on human rights in the host state during the Cold War. However, after the Cold War, places with lower security salience and a US troop presence will be more likely to have greater respect for physical integrity rights. We thus derive the following additional hypothesis:

Hypothesis 4: After the Cold War, the positive effect of troop deployments on salient host state respect for physical integrity rights will be greater than in the Cold War era.

Research Design

In order to test the above hypotheses, we construct a country–year data set containing information on changes in government respect for physical integrity rights, troop deployments, military salience, and a host of control variables from the years 1982 to 2005. These temporal constraints result from the start date of our measure of physical integrity rights and the last year of available data on US troop deployments.

Government respect for physical integrity rights is measured using the Physical Integrity Rights Index from the Cingranelli–Richards Human Rights Data Project (Cingranelli, Richards, and Clay 2014). This index provides a standards-based measure of the extent to which governments respect the rights of their citizens not to be tortured, politically imprisoned, disappeared, and extrajudicially killed. Respect for each of these rights is coded independently on a 0–2 scale and then summed to construct an index ranging from 0 to 8, with low values (0) indicating low respect for physical integrity rights (high repression) and high values (8) indicating cases with high respect for physical integrity rights (low repression; Cingranelli and Richards 1999).

Our main independent variable is the number of US troops present in the host state in a given year. To measure this, we use a data set created by Tim Kane (2006). The data set includes all US troop deployments to every state in the world, from 1950 to 2005. The data set was compiled from disaggregated records from the Department of Defense (the Statistical Information Analysis Division of the Directorate for Information Operations and Reports). Each observation represents the number of “billets” assigned to a country in a given year. This means that the number represents the troop years for each state, not the total number of troops coming in and out of a state in a given year. For example, the observations for a state in which 500 soldiers served half-year tours will look the same as one in which 250 soldiers served one-year tours (both observations would be coded as 250).

We drop from our sample any cases in which the US was involved in a war with the “host” state, as these are cases of invasion deployments, which are not covered under our theory (Martinez Machain and Morgan 2013). This is also in accordance with Schmidt’s (2014) definition of “sovereign basing” as a “long-term, peacetime presence in a state without interference into the host’s domestic structures” (p. 818). Given our limited temporal domain, these include the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 intervention into Kosovo, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq War. To test our hypotheses, we generate a measure of the natural log of troops.⁸ The raw data have a high positive skew with a median of 13 and a mean of 2,182. This positive skew is the result of cases like Germany and Japan that have maintained a large US troop presence since the end of World War II.⁹ Logging the count of troops eliminates much of this skew, with the mean of the logged variable at 3.14 and the median at 2.64.¹⁰

Next, we generate a measure to capture the importance of a particular location to the overall strategic concerns of the US. Acknowledging that security salience is a multidimensional concept, we identify several factors that were clearly important to the US during the time period under analysis. First, we expect that the US would highly value the ability to place troops in a state that is located near a US rival. As such, we code US rivals based on the information contained in Thompson and Dreyer (2012).¹¹ Second, given concerns during the Cold War about the containment of Communism, as well as the continued tension between the US and communist states and organizations in the post–Cold War era, we also collect information on the locations of leftist rebellions, based on data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) Armed Conflict Dataset (N. P. Gleditsch et al. 2002) and the PRIO Conflict Site data (Hallberg 2012), as well as the locations of Marxist governments based on Clark, Fordham, and Nordstrom (2011). Finally, locations near conflicts in which the US is involved are also clearly strategically important to the US. As such, we collected information on the locations of all conflicts in which the US was directly involved from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset (N. P. Gleditsch et al. 2002) and the PRIO Conflict Site data (Hallberg 2012).

We then use these data to create our measure of salience. Using yearly minimum distance data from the CShapes data set (Weidmann, Kuse, and Gleditsch 2010), we determine the absolute minimum distance between each state in the system and the nearest: (1) US rival, (2) Marxist state, (3) leftist rebellion, or (4) US-involved conflict. This distance, which we label strategic distance, serves as our proxy for the strategic security importance of the state as a location for troop deployment. States with a lower strategic distance, that is, ones that are closer to US rivals, US conflicts, Marxist states, or leftist rebellions, are expected to serve as more desirable locations for US troop deployments than states that have higher strategic distance, that is, ones that are further away from these US strategic priorities. If a state takes on any of the four attributes included in the measure to identify strategic salience, its strategic distance is 0. As such, in the models discussed below, we include strategic distance in multiplicative interactions with troop deployments. In line with hypothesis 1, we expect troop deployments in locations with greater strategic distances (i.e., lower strategic value to the US) to exert a greater positive effect on the human rights practices of the host state than deployments in locations with lesser strategic distance. In line with hypothesis 2, we expect the effect of troop deployments on physical integrity rights is diminished at lower strategic distances (greater security value to the US). The further in distance a state is from any of these security concerns, the more likely it is that the US troop presence will have a positive effect on human rights in the host state. In the host states that are close to any of these strategic security concerns, security salience will be higher in those places, thus diminishing the effect of US troop deployments on the host states’ physical integrity rights.

To test the hypothesis dealing with the end of the Cold War (hypothesis 4), we also create a dichotomous measure that takes into account whether the observation occurred during the Cold War (before 1991) or after it. We then observe the effects of the variables of chief theoretical interest in separate Cold War and post–Cold War samples. If hypothesis 4, about the effect of troops increasing after the end of the Cold War, is correct, we should observe that during the Cold War, when the US had not yet begun to implement human rights training in its deployments, a troop presence has little to no effect on the human rights record of a host state, regardless of its security salience.

Finally, we include a set of control variables that are conventional for estimating the level or changes in respect for human rights (Poe and Tate 1994). We include the Revised Combined Polity Score, which ranges from −10 (highly autocratic) to 10 (highly democratic), to control for regime type (Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2003). To control for violent conflict within the state and threats to the regime, we include a measure of civil war. Using the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict data set (Gleditsch et al. 2002), we start with the conflict-year data set, identify all the intrastate wars with more than twenty-five battle deaths, and then generate a dummy variable to indicate whether or not a country year experienced a civil war. In our data set, this variable takes on a value of “1” if there is an ongoing civil war and “0” if there is not. As more populous countries have a greater opportunity for abuses and governments in more developed countries are less likely to violate human rights, we control for both population and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We use the K. S. Gleditsch (2002) expanded trade and GDP data to measure both the population and the GDP per capita. This allows us to avoid losing observations from missing data in the World Bank World Development Indicators measures. Given the large positive skew of both variables, we utilize the natural logarithm of each in the following analyses. We also control for the presence of terrorism in a state (Piazza and Walsh 2009). We measure the number of terror attacks in each country in each year using the Global Terrorism Database (START 2013). This is an event data set that measures terror attacks that fit the definition of “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to obtain political, economic, religious, or social goals through fear, coercion, or intimidation” (Global Terrorism Database 2015, 8). They measure both domestic and international terror attacks that a state experiences. Finally, a lagged level of respect for physical integrity rights is included in each model estimated. We expect the previous year’s physical integrity rights index score to be positively related to the level in the current year.

Given the possibility that the determination of where the US deploys troops might in part hinge on the host state’s respect for physical integrity rights, we utilize two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimations. In these models, we instrument the log of US troops deployed to a state with two variables: (1) the natural log of the distance of the state from the US, based on data from CShapes (Weidmann, Kuse, and Gleditsch 2010) and (2) a dichotomous variable indicating whether that state was a US ally in that year, based on information from the Correlates of War International Military Alliance data (Gibler 2009). These variables, while important predictors of US troop deployments (Allen 2011), should be largely unrelated to government respect for physical integrity rights. That said, we support the use of these variables with several postestimation tests. In both the Durbin and Wu-Hausman tests run on our first model, we find that we can reject the null hypothesis that our independent variable, that is, the log of US troops deployed, is exogenous. As such, it would seem that accounting for this endogeneity is indeed merited. Second, our first-stage model that includes these two instruments has both a high F statistic (400.305) and a highly significant minimum eigenvalue statistic, suggesting that our instruments are strongly correlated with the natural log of US troops deployed. Third, insignificant Saran and Bassman χ² statistics suggest that our instruments are uncorrelated with the error term and that none of our exogenous variables should be treated as endogenous. Taken together, it appears that our instruments are valid and that the use of 2SLS, rather than ordinary least squares, is merited.¹² In addition, to further combat concerns about endogeneity, we lag all independent variables one year.

Results

In this section, we discuss the results from the research design described previously. In summary, the results illustrate support for the idea that US troop deployments only produce improvements in human rights in contexts where there is a lower level of security salience. In addition, it appears that this effect is largely driven by deployments after the Cold War. The results of all of our analyses can be viewed in Table 1.

Table 1.

US Troop Deployments and Government Respect for Physical Integrity Rights.^a

	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
	No interaction	Interaction	Cold War	Post–Cold War
Troops (ln)	−0.0119 (0.0266)	−0.0523 (0.0371)	−0.0441 (0.0372)	−0.0911 (0.0585)
Strategic distance		−6.91e-05** (3.13e-05)	−1.81e-05 (9.66e-05)	−5.58e-05 (4.73e-05)
Troops (ln) × strategic distance		3.06e-05*** (1.13e-05)	2.36e-05 (2.34e-05)	3.64e-05** (1.78e-05)
Polity	0.0309*** (0.00428)	0.0289*** (0.00461)	0.0301*** (0.00657)	0.0343*** (0.00687)
Population (ln)	−0.143*** (0.0206)	−0.125*** (0.0226)	−0.0693** (0.0278)	−0.144*** (0.0360)
Civil war	−0.566*** (0.0993)	−0.563*** (0.102)	−0.490*** (0.140)	−0.676*** (0.131)
GDP per capita (ln)	0.165*** (0.0311)	0.181*** (0.0350)	0.195*** (0.0416)	0.246*** (0.0554)
GTD	−0.00151*** (0.000367)	−0.00138*** (0.000405)	−0.00191*** (0.000419)	−0.000863 (0.000678)
Lagged dependent variable	0.667*** (0.0208)	0.668*** (0.0220)	0.694*** (0.0293)	0.617*** (0.0282)
Constant	1.660*** (0.329)	1.457*** (0.358)	0.823* (0.434)	1.319** (0.578)
Observations	3,373	3,343	1,109	2,234
R ²	0.740	0.735	0.746	0.731

Note: Robust standard errors clustered by country are given in parentheses. All independent variables lagged one year. GDP = gross domestic product; GTD = Global Terrorism Database.

^aTwo-stage least squares.

*p < .1.

**p < .05.

***p < .01.

The 2SLS models estimated and presented in Table 1 allow us to assess whether the effect of US troop deployments on physical integrity rights is conditioned by the security salience of the host state. For simplicity’s sake, we display only the coefficients from the second stage of the instrumental variable model. As such, we remind readers that the logged troops variable and the interaction between logged troops and strategic distance are actually the predicted values for those variables from the first stage of the model including the instruments discussed previously. Model 1 presents the results of a model that includes all of our control variables alongside our chief independent variable, the logged count of US troops, but excludes the hypothesized relationship above. As shown here, the natural logarithm of US troops deployed to a country has no significant unconditional effect on government respect for physical integrity rights. Given that we anticipate that troop deployments will only exert a significant effect on physical integrity in states that are less salient for US security interests, this finding is unsurprising.

However, when we turn to the conditional model suggested by our theory, the results become more interesting. Model 2 includes all of the variables from Model 1 but adds our measure of strategic distance and the interaction between strategic distance and the logged count of troops. In this model, the logged troops coefficient is negative but not statistically significant. The strategic distance coefficient is negative and statistically significant, while the interaction term is positive and statistically significant. However, in order to interpret the conditional effect and statistical significance of troop deployments on physical integrity rights it is necessary to plot the marginal effects (Brambor, Clark, and Golder 2006).

The marginal effects are plotted in Figure 1. In this figure, the x-axis is the strategic distance variable, where low values indicate a host state being in close proximity to other strategically important states and increasing values reflect that the host state is less strategically important in terms of US security interests. The y-axis is the marginal effect of a one unit increase in the natural log of US troops on the level of government respect for physical integrity rights. The solid line plots the marginal effect across varying levels of strategic distance, and the shaded area illustrates the 90 percent confidence interval around that marginal effect. This figure illustrates that, when a state is distant from strategically important locations, and thus, is not particularly salient for US security purposes, increases in the size of a US troop deployment lead to increasing government respect for physical integrity rights. However, as the security salience increases, that positive relationship diminishes to the point where there is no longer a statistically significant relationship between US troop deployments and physical integrity rights. This provides support for hypotheses 1 and 2. When a state is in a strategically important security environment, troop deployments are not significantly associated with increases in physical integrity rights, but when that state is less important to US security, deployments seem to lead to higher levels of respect for physical integrity rights. Hypothesis 3, that is, that highly salient states will respond to US troop deployments with worse human rights practices, receives less support. While the marginal effect of an increased US troop presence is negatively associated with government respect for physical integrity rights in the most salient locations, that is, those states with the lowest strategic distance, this effect does not attain statistical significance.

Figure 1.

Marginal effect of US troops (ln) on government respect for physical integrity rights (90 percent confidence interval).

In models 3 and 4 we attempt to determine if, in line with hypothesis 4, US troop deployments had weaker effects on respect for physical integrity rights during the Cold War than they have in the time since the Cold War. In both models, the logged troops and strategic distance coefficients are negative and statistically insignificant. However, while the interaction coefficient is positive in both models, it only attains statistical significance in the post–Cold War sample. The substantive meaning of these results is best understood from the marginal effects graphs shown in Figure 2. While the overall marginal effect of US troop deployments across the range of strategic distance is fairly similar in the Cold War and post–Cold War periods, the marginal effect only attains statistical significance for states at high strategic distances in the post–Cold War period. As such, we can only claim weak support for Hypothesis 4. While we can say that US troops exert a statistically significant effect in the post–Cold War era and did not exert such an effect during the Cold War, we cannot say that the effect of troops changed in the post–Cold War era, as the marginal effect of troops during that time period does not appear to be significantly different from the marginal effect of troops during the Cold War.

Figure 2.

Marginal effect of US troops (ln) on government respect for physical integrity rights, Cold War, and post–Cold War (90 percent confidence interval).

Across all the models, the results on the control variables are consistent with existing literature. Increases in terror attacks lead to decreases in respect for physical integrity rights. More democratic states are less likely to engage in repression. States with larger populations are more repressive than states with smaller populations. Governments in states experiencing a civil war are more likely to violate their citizens’ human rights, and the higher a state’s per capita GDP, the less repressive the government is. Finally, the lagged dependent variable is significant and positive, as expected.

Conclusion

As demonstrated previously, members of the US military have been increasingly trained to take human rights concerns into account, both in their own field operations and in their work with other countries’ militaries. Further, there are good theoretical reasons to suspect that states that receive large troop deployments from the US would like to maintain those deployments and, as such, will demonstrate higher respect for physical integrity rights. However, there is also reason to suspect that this pressure to respect human rights is largely diminished when a state becomes more salient to US foreign policy interests, as the likelihood that the US government will remove its troops from such a state is fairly remote. Our empirical findings largely back up this logic, showing that, in less salient states during the post–Cold War period, as human rights training has increasingly been incorporated into the US Military training, US troops have largely been related to better human rights practices in their host states. However, in states with a high security salience, as well as during the Cold War, when these changes had not yet been implemented, the US troop presence had no statistically significant impact on the human rights practices of the host states.

These findings largely fit in with the growing literature on the interaction between US foreign policy and human rights. Previous studies have demonstrated that US economic and military aid are affected by recipient state human rights practices, but that US military interests still largely overpower human rights concerns in the distribution of said aid (Apodaca and Stohl 1999). Likewise, while the improvement of human rights has long been a stated goal of US foreign aid programs, researchers have struggled to find a systematic relationship between the receipt of aid and subsequent improvement in physical integrity rights (Regan 1995; Finkel et al. 2005). Overall, our results, combined with these others largely suggest that the US is capable of acting as a principled supporter of human rights norms internationally; however, when these norms come into conflict with strategic interests abroad, the US government’s effect on the importance of its fellow governments’ respect for human rights appears to recede.

This is an important finding for policy purposes. In the post–World War II era, the US military has maintained a widespread presence across the globe. The consequences of these activities are important for both US foreign policy makers considering deploying troops abroad and perhaps more so for the states that host these troops. For US foreign policy makers and the US military, if one of their goals is to promote human rights norms, it is important to know where these goals are not being met. For populations of states with US troops deployed, it is important to know what the intended and unintended consequences of those deployments can be. The good news is that in places with lower security salience, these populations can expect the added benefit of improved respect for human rights. Unfortunately, states with more proximate security concerns cannot expect that a US military presence will have an impact on improving the human rights.

Nevertheless, more study is needed on this topic. In particular, further research should examine how security and economic characteristics of a state’s region condition the effect that US troop deployments have on respect for human rights. Taking into account variation in the purpose of troops (e.g., whether they are there for peacekeeping, disaster aid, or support of domestic troops) may reveal that some types of deployments are more likely to lead to positive or negative changes in the human rights records of the host states. As we mentioned earlier, and as it was exemplified in the interviews we conducted, cases in which US troops are working directly to train the military of the host state can include explicit human rights training and, therefore, may be more likely to lead to positive changes in the host’s human rights records, through changes in the host’s security apparatus’ behavior. While this is not the only mechanism through which we should expect human rights to improve in the host country (e.g., the US may be more likely to obtain concessions in the form of more respect for physical integrity rights when it can credibly threaten to remove troops providing security to the host country), it is certainly a key one that we have highlighted throughout this study. Although, currently we do not have the data available to separate the US military training missions from other types of deployments, we recognize the problems associated with being unable to separate out training missions. Future work can focus on collecting microlevel data (possibly even at the substate, regional level) on the specific activities that are carried out by the US troops on deployment and how those can affect human rights practices in the host state.

In addition, though noninvasion deployments in the post–World War II era have almost all been American, there have been some by other major powers, such as Russia/Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and France (Shmidt 2014). We are uncertain whether the conclusions of this article would travel well to deployments by other states and would like to explore this further in future work.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

All authors contributed equally to the preparation of this article and, as such, are listed in alphabetical order. All remaining errors are our own.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank David Davis, Michael Flynn, Andrew Owsiak, John D. Willingham, two anonymous reviewers, and the editor of Journal of Conflict Resolution for their help in preparing this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary material for this article is available online.

Notes

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