“Hell on Earth” – UNC Asheville Researchers Release Updated Human Rights Data Showing that Nearly 70% of the World’s Population Live in Countries Experiencing Gross and Systematic Human Rights Violations

According to Political Terror Scale (PTS), one of the oldest and most widely used human rights data sets, increasing numbers of people are now living in countries marked by extraordinarily high levels of torture, disappearances, summary executions and political imprisonment – or what human rights scholars euphemistically describe as “hell on earth.”

The PTS research team, led by political science faculty at UNC Asheville, reported that conclusion in their just released 2019 update for the PTS which incorporates data from the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018.

PTS ranks human rights conditions in nations around the world on a scale from one to five. Level one countries are “under a secure rule of law, people are not imprisoned for their views, and torture is rare or exceptional. Political murders are extremely rare.” At level four, “Civil and political rights violations have expanded to large numbers of the population. Murders, disappearances and torture are a common part of life.” Level five conditions are described this way: “Terror has expanded to the whole population. The leaders of these societies place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue personal or ideological goals.”

While 62 countries are ranked at level one, those nations are home to only 8.5% of the world’s population. Levels one and two comprise more than half the world’s nations, but just 15.6% of the global population. On the other hand, 69.8% of the world’s people live in nations ranked at levels four and five, the so-called “hell-on-earth” categories.

The PTS team’s 2019 report also highlights very troubling trends in global human rights conditions. Level four countries went from only about a quarter of the world’s population in 1985 to more than 60% by the year 2000 and 64.4% in 2018. Nearly 45% of the world lived in “middling” level three nations in 1985 but that population percentage has fallen to 14.5% according to the current data.

The PTS scale, which was begun in the early 1980s, is cited by a significant and growing number of scholars, in journals including The Lancet, Hiroshima Peace Research Journal, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Human Rights, Journal of Peace Research, and Human Rights Quarterly, in numerous books, and in reports by organizations and government agencies. Some 10,500 people have visited the politicalterrorscore.org website in the past year, and the past year has seen 4,200 downloads of PTS data.

Principal researchers on the PTS team are:

• Mark Gibney, who has directed the PTS project since 1984, after it began a few years earlier at Purdue University. Gibney is UNC Asheville’s Belk Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of political science, an affiliated professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute (Sweden), and a member of the Economic and Social Rights Group (ESRG) and University of Connecticut Human Rights Center.
• Peter Haschke, UNC Asheville associate professor of political science, director of the University’s Human Rights Studies Program, and author of the 2019 PTS report. Haschke also is a UNC Asheville alumnus.
• Linda Cornett, UNC Asheville chair and professor of political science.
• Reed Wood, Arizona State University associate professor of political science and UNC Asheville alumnus.
• Daniel Arnon, now a Ph.D. student at Emory University, who earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. in political science from UNC Asheville.
• Attilio Pisanò, University of Salento (Italy) assistant professor of legal philosophy and human rights.
• Gray Barrett, who has just begun work as a data content and management specialist with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Conflict Stabilization Operations. He earned a master’s degree from Emory University after graduate studies at the University of Oslo (Norway) as a Fulbright Scholar, and is a UNC Asheville alumnus.

For more information, visit politicalterrorscale.org or email Mark Gibney (mgibney@unca.edu) or Peter Haschke (phaschke@unca.edu).