Why are human rights well protected by some states, while others have a notoriously bad repression record? Understanding the conditions under which governments protect human rights is crucial for the field of International Relations and policy makers alike. This module discuss current research on political and economic determinants of human rights, with a focus on state repression and violations of personal integrity rights (torture, disappearances mass atrocities, detention). The old title of the module was "International Human Rights", and it is now re-named to match with the focus on State Repression. The main goal was to rigorously review and assess published research and methodological approaches to identify research gaps, understand human rights data, and formulate new research questions. The assignments included elements of **research transparency in the form of a pre-analysis plan** and finding replication data for published articles: 1. oral presentation that criticises theory and methods of a published comparative human rights article (including finding replication data for this article) 2. literature review to identify a research gap in comparative human rights 3. pre-analysis plan for a quantitative human rights project, including a section on the importance of research transparency, and where the proposed project would upload its materials