Did 9/11 Change Everything? Security and Human Rights Trade-offs in International Cooperation

Under what conditions are states more likely to trade-off human rights when cooperating on sensitive areas of international security? We now know that during the post-9/11 period, a number of countries have cooperated with the United States of America on a range of controversial security matters. The clandestine nature of counterterrorism cooperation makes it difficult to study the causes and dynamics of trading off security and human rights in international politics directly. However, one example of these post-9/11 practices (extraordinary rendition) has the advantage of being observable (ex-post), as we can analyse detainee testimony and suspected extraordinary rendition flight paths using publicly available data. This thesis capitalizes on an opportunity to provide theoretically driven and empirically testable answers to questions on the causes and consequences of contentious forms of international security cooperation. What influenced more than a quarter of the world’s countries to participate in rendition, secret detention and interrogation operations during the post-9/11 period? What explains the variation in the political costs of participation in the post-9/11 Central Intelligence Agency extraordinary rendition, secret detention and interrogation programme? This dissertation focuses on the tension between common and conflicting interests among states and between parties and voters to answer these questions. This thesis provides a substantive contribution to international relations literature by suggesting both which countries are more likely to tradeoff human rights and cooperate with one another on contentious security issues and which domestic environments are most likely to generate the greatest political costs for getting caught. The main findings from this thesis have important policy implications and provide academics and advocacy researchers with new tools for detecting human rights violations and holding states to account where previous efforts have failed due to a lack of evidence.