The acts of abuse were then aggregated to the country level by year and combined
with a global data set comprising common socio-economic and political indicators in
an effort to explain the cross-national variation in HRD abuse. Consistent with the
extant global comparative literature on human rights violations (see Landman 2005a),
the results of the analysis show that abuse against HRDs is significantly lower among
those countries with high levels of democracy, which in turn have disproportionately
passed post-911 anti-terror legislation. Abuse against HRDs is significantly related to
past levels of abuse, a large population, intra-state warfare, and ‘exceptional’ levels of
US overseas loans and grants. Finally, the analysis shows that abuse against HRDs
has been significantly higher since 2001, an increase that has been modelled as an
‘intercept shift’ (see Mohr 1995: 209-215; Landman, forthcoming) in the overall trend
of abuse between 1997 and 2003.
But what do these findings mean for the larger substantive debate on defending
human rights in the age of terror? History shows us that terrorism is not new. Nation
states have lived with various forms of terrorism for hundreds of years, and the
current climate after September 11, 2001 is part of a much larger set of practices that
have been around for some time. Despite twelve separate UN conventions on
terrorism, there has been very little attempt to provide a definition, which is probably
more down to politics than the absence of a consensus about what constitutes
terrorism. One definition has been provided in the Report of a High Level Panel on
Threats, Challenges and Change:
Any action …that is intended to cause death or seriously bodily harm to
civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its
nature or context, it to intimidate a population or to compel a
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Convention