The politics of abolition: Reframing the death penalty's history in comparative perspective

Abstract

Literature on opposition to the death penalty typically characterizes abolition as inexorable and attributes its fulfillment to the age of human rights. Although most countries abolished capital punishment after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this article uses three comparative case studies to demonstrate abolition’s entanglement with a broader range of political, legal, and cultural factors. Applying a historically grounded nonteleological approach, we offer three insights. First, civilizationist values drove abolitionism in countries in the “vanguard,” such as Canada and England/Wales, where human rights rationales were expressed well after abolition and as a mark of superiority. Second, death penalty abolition has often allied with decolonization and penal reform, but assertions of independence and sovereignty have periodically provoked reinstatement, as in Mexican and Philippine history, which underscores the fragility of abolition. Third, state-centric approaches to de jure and de facto abolition overlook the practice of extrajudicial and summary “rebel” executions in polities such as Myanmar and Mali, which lack a state monopoly on force. Further historical studies that do not presuppose a human rights explanation of abolition and that compare jurisdictions within as well as between the Global North and South will better grasp the death penalty’s complex history. Show more