About P.a.p.-Blog

I blog about human rights – including political and economic rights such as the right to participate in government (democracy being a subset of human rights) and the right not to suffer poverty – from the perspective of politics, art, philosophy (hence p.a.p.), law, economics, statistics, psychology etc.

The statistical perspective in particular is very important. The topic of human rights is, I believe, in need of a data approach because the traditional way of dealing with it is way too anecdotal. The main advantage of such a data approach is that it can measure a general state of affairs, not limited to specific cases or events. It provides a more general understanding of the level of respect for (a) human right(s) in a particular country or region, and it uncovers trends that are not immediately detectable on the microscopic level of individual events. More about this approach here and here.

Since it’s difficult to cover the topic of human rights without discussing atrocities, cruelty and violence, there’s a content warning.

Most of the post on this blog are installments of so-called “blog series”. This allows me to split the field into various subtopics and to revisit my favorite themes on a regular basis. Maybe it will also help the reader: he or she can quickly scan the post titles and see whether or not a particular post is worthy of his or her attention. An overview of the running series is here.

Aside from the daily posts, there are also a number of static pages where I collect things which I have posted and which I believe deserve a life that’s longer than a few days on the frontpage:

• a page called “human rights statistics” where I dump all the data and numbers published in regular posts
• and another page called “human rights maps” where I do the same for the maps that I post now and again
• a human rights tools page
• etc.

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