Speaker Series: Genevieve Bates

Human rights abuses by agents of the state security apparatus have sparked demands for reform globally. In this paper, we explore how framing these reform policies directly as human rights issues affects public support for enacting reforms. We do so using a case study of the United States, where state abuses are often committed by policing institutions and are disproportionately experienced by minority communities. We use a survey experiment to test whether framing police reform initiatives as part of an international movement to implement transitional justice affects support for these policies among the American public. Our results largely confirm that framing racial justice policies as transitional justice can increase support, especially among non-Republicans. These findings have important implications for research on human rights promotion and transitional justice, especially in places like the United States, which have only recently become the focus of human rights scholarship.

Dr. Genevieve Bates is the Mary Herman Rubinstein Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, Bates was an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, and a postdoctoral fellow with the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Bates received their PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2021.

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