Human Rights Research Hub | Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute

International Criminal Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Digital Archive Project

The goal of the ICTY Digital Archive Project is to advance a better understanding of the legal decisions of the ICTY and the history of the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The Project provides access to a range of documents and other records associated with the work of prosecutors, expert witnesses, researchers, and translators at the ICTY. The project curates ICTY documents relating to key decisions of the tribunal on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed during the 1991-1995 conflict.

Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP)

PJP was created in Spring 2020 as an online journaling platform and interdisciplinary research study of how people around the world were experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic. The project, which ran May 2020-May 2022, offered a digital space where participants could create weekly journals of their COVID-19 experiences. With over 1,800 participants in 55 countries, the project is rooted in a human rights-based commitment to democratizing knowledge production. Since the conclusion of PJP’s first phase, it continues to invite contributions quarterly, and has generated new projects on the enduring impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF) Index

SERF Scores countries’ performance on fulfilling social and economic rights on a yearly basis. SERF is unique in that it considers not only the extent to which citizens enjoy these rights, but also the extent to which the government complies with its duty to progressively realize these rights with available resources. SERF has yielded award-winning research, graduate training, and data-driven policymaking, and is part of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI).

Subnational Nonstate Actor Governance

This project develops a measurement strategy for subnational variation in non-state actors’ territorial control and governance within conflict zones, designed to facilitate comparison of conflict dynamics within and across country contexts. We draw upon local and national news sources to identify reporting on a rebel organization’s violent and governance activity, which we incorporate into a measurement model to estimate the spatial and temporal extent of the rebel organization’s territorial control and forms of governance. The first iteration of the measurement strategy is applied to the Syrian Civil War.

Terrorism Attributed to Political Actors

Attributes incidents in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the most comprehensive corpus of terrorism incidents with worldwide coverage, to specific non-state political actors in complementary social science datasets. By linking data on terrorism incidents to the data on the organizations that perpetrate these attacks, TAPA facilitates new empirical research investigating the origins and dynamics of terrorism. The first stage of the project focused on rebel actors in armed conflict.

Understanding Harms in Online Hate Speech

The last decade has witnessed a drastic increase in the prevalence of hate speech online and a simultaneous increase in right-wing authoritarianism, digital authoritarianism, and hate crimes in the U.S. and abroad. The convergence of these events has contributed to claims that dangerous speech increases support or participation in violence against others. However, longstanding questions remain open, including; what kind of language increases the likelihood that otherwise “ordinary persons” would support or tolerate the denigration of vulnerable populations? This project evaluates the effects of online hate speech on empathy and the willingness of survey participants to harm other groups or constrain their rights.

The Forced Migration Lab

The Forced Migration Lab was created in 2025 to foster interdisciplinary research, policy analysis, and community engagement related to the human-created displacement of people from around the world. It aims to develop human-rights informed knowledge and practices in response to forced migration through providing research workshops, hosting interns and student researchers, and enhancing the visibility of teaching, research, and community engagement on forced migration at UConn. By collaborating with scholars, practitioners, and displaced community members, the lab aims to advance knowledge, influence policy, and support those affected by forced migration.

Dialogue and Human Rights Education

Drawing from data collected annually in select UConn human rights courses this project seeks to identify and measure the utility of dialogic approaches as an effective pedagogical tool for human rights education, training and practice, and is guided by three central research questions: What is the utility of dialogic approaches as tools for human rights education, training and practice? What skills do students develop through dialogue? Do these translate to their human rights practices in their personal, political and professional lives? Through this work, we aim to develop an innovative model using dialogue to explicitly connect practices of human rights with human rights content and curriculum.

Pandemic Journaling Project Archive Opens for Research

A repository of data detailing the personal experiences of more than 1,800 people living during the COVID-19 pandemic is available to researchers for the first time
HRI Faculty Spotlight, Richard A. Wilson

Incitement, Hate Speech, and the Freedom of Expression
Buen Vivir: Examining Well-being in Colombia at a Time of Protest and Police Violence

‘Can we create new indicators of well-being using this Indigenous concept of Buen Vivir?’