A Comparative Framework for Human Rights, Conflict Escalation, and Peace Formation (1920–Present) Author - Kaveh Dimitri Salahi Priority Manuscript
Description
This paper develops a comparative framework for understanding how human rights violations, political instability, and large-scale violence emerge, escalate, and eventually stabilize across different societies from 1920 to the present. Rather than treating each conflict as a separate and unique historical event that cannot be meaningfully compared with others, the study argues that many conflicts follow recurring structural patterns that become visible when examined through a consistent comparative lens. The goal of this approach is not to reduce complex historical realities into a simple formula or to claim that future events can be precisely predicted, but rather to improve understanding of the conditions under which violence becomes more likely and the conditions under which it is reduced, contained, or resolved. The framework combines three areas of analysis that are often studied separately. International human rights law provides a shared language for identifying violations and institutional breakdowns across different political systems and cultural settings. Comparative historical analysis provides a structured way of breaking conflicts into episodes that can be examined consistently across time and geography. Insights from biology and cognitive science support the assumption that all human populations share broadly similar psychological and behavioral foundations, even though culture and institutions strongly shape how these foundations are expressed in practice. By integrating these perspectives, the paper proposes that both conflict and peace should be understood as probabilistic processes rather than fixed outcomes. These processes are shaped by interacting factors such as institutional legitimacy, economic stability, identity formation, and the reliability of information environments. The result is a structured comparative approach that allows recurring patterns of escalation and stabilization to be identified across very different historical contexts, while still preserving the complexity and uniqueness of individual cases.