Buen Vivir Index

A novel instrument that measures a sense of Buen Vivir (i.e., good living or living beautifully due to harmonious relationships between human rights and the rights of nature). This project leverages South American indigenous ways of thinking to challenge existing wellbeing and quality of life indicators. Analyses of comparative populations can highlight the importance of indigenous perspectives for climate change mitigation efforts.

CIRIGHTS

The CIRIGHTS human rights dataset contains information about government respect for 30+ human rights for approximately 196 countries for the years 1981-2021. The CIRIGHTS project builds upon the previous CIRI Human Rights Data Project. The goal of the CIRIGHTS data project is to create numerical measures for every internationally recognized human right for all countries of the world.

Contact

David Richards, Associate Professor, Political Science & Human Rights
david.richards@uconn.edu

Crowd Counting Consortium

The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) collects data on the size and political activities of crowds engaged in marches, protests, demonstrations, and other actions throughout the United States based on information reported in local and national media and on social media. The data are made freely available for the public interest and to further scholarly research.

Contact

Jeremy Pressman, Professor, Political Science
jeremy.pressman@uconn.edu

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.

Contact

Kathryn Libal, Director, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute; Professor, Social Work & Human Rights
kathryn.libal@uconn.edu

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.

Contact

Sarah Willen, Professor, Anthropology
sarah.willen@uconn.edu

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).

Contact

Susan Randolph, Emeritus Professor, Economics
susan.randolph@uconn.edu

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.

Contact

Michael Rubin, Assistant Professor, Political Science & Human Rights
michael.a.rubin@uconn.edu

Transportation Equity Index Project

Transportation infrastructure can be a substantial enabler or barrier to social inclusion. Although the link between equity in access to opportunities and socio-economic impact is frequently discussed in the planning literature, it is not measured systematically. This project will construct a human rights-based measure of transportation equity and assess its relationship to social deprivation.

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.