This chapter discusses the current state of research on deterrence, highlighting critical limitations and, again, the need for an approach that can help to advance the field and policy. Review of extant work on specific and general deterrence, objective and perceptual deterrence, experiential effects, and other areas of deterrence scholarship makes clear that additional problems – besides the overly narrow conceptualization of deterrence inherited from the eighteenth-century accounts of it – exist. These problems include a large body of disconnected and inchoate research, the lack of a unifying theory for connecting research findings or generating new questions, incomplete recognition of the elements that inhere in deterrence and their importance to understanding it, limitations in research that derive from the incomplete understanding of deterrence, and the persistent lack of an answer to a basic question: Do legal punishments deter? This state of affairs is what motivated and guided development of the reconceptualized theory of deterrence, comprehensive deterrence theory (CDT), presented in the book.

Chapter 2 develops my theory of regional human rights court deterrence. I begin by defining and explaining regional human rights court deterrence, focusing on two types of deterrence: general and specific. I then discuss two mechanisms of deterrence: prosecutorial and social.The chapter then proceeds by examining the role of the executive in regional court deterrence, specifically the role of the executive in the adoption, administration, monitoring, and enforcement of human rights policy. I argue that human rights policy change is costly for the executive, and as a result, the executive must have the capacity and willingness and respond to adverse regional court judgments with human rights policy change. With respect to capacity, I argue that the executive is more likely to undertake feasible human rights policy changes in response to adverse regional court judgments. I also argue that the executive is more likely to respond to adverse judgments with human rights policy change when the executive has access to outside resources or when the state is fiscally flexible. With respect to willingness, I argue that the executive is more likely to undertake human rights policy change when the executive faces pressure from the mass public, economic elites, or political elites.