We explore how societies that have endured severe human rights violations confront and address their past and examine international mechanisms designed to protect human rights. This chapter asks: How can a society be rebuilt and made functional in the aftermath of human rights abuses? How can a culture of human rights be fostered? Should the pursuit of justice for perpetrators take precedence, or should reconciliation and forgiveness be the primary focus? We delve into the concept of transitional justice, its meaning, the key challenges to its implementation, and the effectiveness of various mechanisms in restoring justice and peace.

After highlighting patterns of types and targets of human rights violations, we introduce the main perpetrators. Trying to understand what motivates them, and, more importantly, how they can be constrained, is key to improving respect for human rights. We start by introducing a theoretical framework that helps us understand why human rights are violated. Why do peaceful forms of communication and negotiation collapse in favour of violence and destruction? Are acts of atrocity born out of rational calculations or are they the product of erratic and unpredictable behaviour? We then apply this theoretical model to understand the behaviour of the most common perpetrators of life integrity violations, the military and the police, as well as less prominent perpetrators, such as militias, rebel groups, and criminal cartels. Throughout this chapter we focus primarily on perpetrators of physical violence but integrate brief examples of other types of human rights violations.

We discuss why one might want to measure and quantify the concept of human rights. We introduce prominent attempts to capture the extent to which certain groups of rights are violated in specific countries and regions, and we present a simple system that has been used to collect information on human rights violations across the world. If we want to find out how we can prevent the suffering people endure, we need to investigate the causes of ill-treatment and the failure to provide and protect these rights. We also discuss different types of targets for rights violations and provisions, such as journalists, or the ability of civil society groups organizations to freely engage in political activities. Using a multitude of measures and angles allows us to understand where and when countries provide better, or worse, protection for specific human rights in the twenty-first century compared to other countries. Lastly, we discuss why getting a full picture of human rights violations is difficult, especially when evidence of wrongdoing could open perpetrators up to accountability.

The sixth chapter provides a deeper exploration of probabilistic models, building upon concepts encountered earlier in the text. The chapter illustrates how to construct diverse models, particularly by employing the notion of conditional independence. It also outlines standard methods for estimating parameters and hidden states, as well as techniques for sampling. The chapter concludes by discussing and implementing applications such as Kalman filtering and Gibbs sampling. The chapter covers a range of topics, including parametric families of probability distributions, maximum likelihood estimation, modeling complex dependencies using conditional independence and marginalization, and applications such as linear-Gaussian models and Kalman filtering.

Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

This chapter introduces the mathematics of data through the example of clustering, a fundamental technique in data analysis and machine learning. The chapter begins with a review of essential mathematical concepts, including matrix and vector algebra, differential calculus, optimization, and elementary probability, with practical Python examples. The chapter then delves into the k-means clustering algorithm, presenting it as an optimization problem and deriving Lloyd's algorithm for its solution. A rigorous analysis of the algorithm's convergence properties is provided, along with a matrix formulation of the k-means objective. The chapter concludes with an exploration of high-dimensional data, demonstrating through simulations and theoretical arguments how the "curse of dimensionality" can affect clustering outcomes.

While the academic study of International Relations immediately following the World Wars was focused on the causes of war and the conditions of peace, the diversification of IR in the mid twentieth century led to the creation of a discrete subfield of security studies. For the remainder of the twentieth century, this subfield focused exclusively on the problem of war – conventional and nuclear – between nation-states. But the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of multiple, opaque, and transnational security risks opened an intellectual space within security studies for a re-envisioning of the analytical approaches to security, as well as to a widening of the agenda. Security was no longer linked exclusively to war but also to a wider range of issues, and security was no longer exclusively conceptualized as the continued existence of the state but applied also to a multitude of actors.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, settler colonialism, and patriarchy. It begins with the story of Abigail Echo-Hawk, the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, and an enrolled citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. Abigail has advocated for decolonizing data to stop the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the US. Informed by tribal critical race theory (TribalCrit), this chapter defines and examines popular myths of settler colonialism and patriarchy, two intersecting systems at the root of this crisis and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the US. Settler colonialism by White Europeans involves seizing land, eradicating Indigenous peoples and culture, and creating a permanent settler society on that territory. Patriarchy is a system of gendered domination that invests men with exclusive rights, authority, and privilege over women. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on the climate crisis and the Land Back movement. It ends with a discussion of Abigail Echo-Hawk and the importance of stories.

This chapter looks at how energy fits into our understanding of international security as part of the widening of the security agenda. First, we define exactly what energy security means. Then we look at what theories of international security predict around energy security before moving on to a case study of the Middle East as an energy supplier. The chapter rounds out with a look at how the great powers in today’s international system are approaching the energy challenge.