Book Review: Todd Landman. Protecting Human Rights

Book Review

Todd Landman. Protecting Human Rights: A Comparative Study. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005. 231 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 1-58901-063-9.

The post World War II era dawned a new age of countries not only willing to adopt human rights practices but showed the necessity to do so due to the horrific occurrences during the war. Todd Landman discusses how international law and human rights had begun and grown since the war along with the disappearance of authoritarianism and the welcoming of global democracy. In his book, Landman seeks to discover if the nation-states participating in the international human rights regime constrain and limit their behavior in order to protect the sanctity of the rights of individuals. He conducts his study through a global comparative method and quantitative analysis to assess the growth and effectiveness of the international human rights regime.

Landman begins his study with a beautiful yet explanatory narrative of the turn of the century and the birth of the international human rights regime after World War II. He discusses how countries were more than willing to turn away from authoritarianism and imperialist regimes and welcome democracy as their new form of government. He states that this is an important turning point in human rights history as it subsequently led to the development of several human rights oriented organizations thus leading to the ability to conduct the study as it gathers information from a total of 193 countries. Landman then continues by stating what exactly he is studying and how he is conducting the study.

In its essence, Landman aims to study a "theory-driven empirical analysis of the growth and effectiveness of the international human rights regime" (6). He successfully does this by conducting a study using a pooled cross-sectional time-series data set of 193 countries over 25 years that yielded 4,825 observations with his goal of hoping to understand how the international human rights regime has evolved over this time and whether or not it has had an impact on human rights practices.

From a methodological standpoint, Landman conducts flawless statistical studies by drawing on other scholars' previous statistical work to add to the value and validity of his own. Landman uses several small-N, large-N, bivariate, multivariate, studies, along with numerous table, graphs, and charts to visualize his findings. He does so with an exceptional explanation of each as he tries to put into laments terms what exactly he is studying as the statistical numbers and graphs can be daunting to the untrained eye.

His first study consisted of measuring human rights and the conceptualization of it based on a legal framework of the term and how it is surrounded by a series of methodological problems like precision, reliability, validity, equivalence, and aggregation, as he notes that although there is a universal definition of human rights one can look up, human rights isn't always universal in definition to one another and this can account for human rights violations occurrences. He outlines how he measures human rights in practice and in principle, then lays out the explanatory and control variables he will use for the following studies within the book.

The author takes an in-depth approach in the following chapters after the setup of the study itself and it is necessary to do so considering how rigorous his studies are. He is really only trying to see the growth and effectiveness of the human rights regime across space and time but does so with a very sophisticated approach. He uses several different statistical models to test whether countries have ratified treaties or not, which countries are democratic, when did the become democractic, and their variables: wealth, IGOs, INGOs, trade, Civil War, International War, and population. He explains that these variables are necessary to try and understand the human rights violations over time as they directly affect a country and their human rights occurrences.

Throughout the book, Landman does an excellent job of explaining the statistical models he uses and the actual pictures of every single one guides the reader in their further understanding of the complicated material. His one fault is that the models may be too sophisticated for some readers in terms of the bivariate correlation matrices included in the studies. While they are necessary to his study, perhaps he could have broken down the tables even further to account for those who do not have a mathematical background.

Through his intense and complex study, Landman sought to understand the mutual relationship between the norms of human rights, country participation, and the degree to which that participation makes a difference for human rights protection (159). Landman's real strength is in explaining his findings through his complex studies. He argues that his analysis focuses on global patterns of variations of general relationships between international law and state practice, and that the gap between human rights in principle and in practice is where the problem lies. Landman successfully argues his point and I am convinced by the surplus of evidence he provides. He answers his research question of what accounts for the effectiveness of human rights over space and time and does so in an eloquent and scientific manner.