Abstract
In an attempt to gain a more nuanced understanding of truth commission impact on violence within a society, I devote Chap. 5 to testing the argued relationships using the SCAD—information on protests, riots, strikes, and other similar social disturbances in Africa between 1990 and 2011. I find that the authority awarded to a truth commission by its mandate decreases the total number of SCAD events that occur in a particular country by about 11%. Additionally, public hearings perform counter to my expectations. Based on my statistical analysis, public hearings (transparency) increase violence by a little less than 6% compared to truth commission countries that do not hold public hearings. This chapter further discusses these and other results in greater depth.
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http://www.scaddata.org. See website for codebook.
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The number of observations in my analysis is low and as a result limits my degrees of freedom. I control for both selection effects and the primary county-level variables associated with social and political violence.
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Nichols, A.D. (2019). Truth Commission Legitimacy and Violence in Africa. In: Impact, Legitimacy, and Limitations of Truth Commissions. Human Rights Interventions. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11172-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11172-4_6
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