Christian Davenport

Innovative databases derived from archival sources as well as content analyses are affiliated with both sets of research. Davenport is generally viewed as being one of the founding scholars regarding the quantitative examination of state repression/human rights violation as well as one of the earliest scholars to engage in what has become an effort to explore sub-national, disaggregated, organizational as well as individual-level dynamics within conflict and contention. While most of his research has been concerned with explaining onset, variation and lethality, newer work has moved to explain termination as well as consequences/legacies/outcomes. [citation needed] Some of Davenport's work has provided foundational insights about political conflict and contention. For example, he has shown that there is a "domestic democratic peace" (mirroring the democratic peace in international relations) with democracies being less likely to use repression and when relevant behavior is used it tends to be less violent. At the same time, he has shown that the democratic peace is vulnerable to reduction and incapacity when political authorities are being challenged behaviorally with protest, terrorism, revolution and insurgency. He has shown that repression increases the likelihood that some behavioral challengers will escalate their efforts whereas others will remove themselves from harms way as a function of whether or not they experienced repressive behavior directly. He also found that for certain historical periods African American protests have been policed very differently than white ones in a piece called "Protesting While Black". [citation needed] This research has been supported by a wide variety of institutions: e. , 10 grants from the National Science Foundation, one from the Carnegie Foundation, Clingendael Institute, Social Science Research Council and the Research Council of Norway. [citation needed] Davenport researched untouchability and caste discrimination with Martin Macwan, an activist from Gujarat who in 2000 received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and Navsarjan Trust, surveying 100 different practices. The government of Gujarat rejected their results, commissioning its own study. [citation needed] Related, his 2004 estimate about the number of people killed during the Rwanda genocide has been the subject of controversy. This work was featured in a 2014 BBC documentary incorrectly stating that only

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Information compiled from: Wikipedia, Bing Knowledge Graph. Data last verified May 2026.