Abstract
The State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices have been published for nearly every country in the world since 1976, however, the reports from then differ drastically from the reports being published more recently. Reports have expanded not only in detail of the abuses covered but also in the breadth of topics and subject matter. While older reports focused almost exclusively on state-sponsored violence, the reports have evolved to include deprivation of rights by non-state actors through violence such as hate crimes or domestic violence. This paper argues that the presence and length of sections relating to specific societal groups, as well as the level of detail and length of the reports overall, are shaped by a combination of differing foreign policy goals of presidential administrations and political parties, shifts in funding to the State Department, and changing international human rights norms. Evidence is found that all three of these factors have influenced the content of the reports and explain changes from year to year.
How to Cite
Barnes, J., (2019) “What Matters When Writing Wrongs: Evolution of the U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 32(1), 5/1/2019.
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