Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'International relations|Political science'

Since 2002, the United States has been conducting drone strikes as an integral part of its war on terror against al Qaeda. This paper discusses the evolution of that practice and considers the legal implications of the targeted killing of alleged members of al Qaeda and its affiliate organizations in non-battlefield situations. It argues that the U.S. is negatively influencing international law at a time when the law is unsettled with regard to non-battlefield targeting of members of armed opposition groups. Further, some of the strikes conducted by the U.S. violate the principles of distinction, proportionality and military necessity. The paper suggests that the U.S. should alter its course of actions, support a more restrained view of the boundaries of targeted killing, and limit any targeted killings to high-level members of terrorist organizations.

At the conclusion of the Cold War, many hoped the international system had finally escaped the harsh realities of geopolitics. Despite optimism about the emergence of an American-led unipolar system, some structural realists believed the abatement of geopolitics was a temporary phenomenon: a brief respite before a return to great power conflict. This gloomy worldview gave rise to the sub-school of offensive realism, which theorizes that states pursue relative power maximization to ensure survival and, ideally, regional hegemony. A relatively young school, offensive realism has primarily focused on the paths states take to pursue bids for regional hegemony. This study seeks to fill some of the gaps that exist in how great powers, having achieved regional hegemony, behave abroad. Support for this research is drawn from a review of existing literature on offensive realism and a case study on U.S. behavior following 1898.

Wealth and stability of the region have a direct influence on the foreign policy and security of landlocked states. Landlocked states residing in poor and unstable neighborhoods, consequently, experience instability and have more limited foreign policy options compared to those landlocked states which are located in the rich and stable regions of the world. Besides those, two other factors, nationalism and the nature of the export product, extensively influence foreign policy and security of some landlocked countries. However, they are exceptions to the rule. Wealth and stability of the neighborhood determine the direction and fate of landlocked countries foreign policies and security measures.

The Responsibility to Protect principle was founded on the premise that sovereignty requires responsibility. The principle establishes the responsibility of states to protect their citizens from mass atrocity crimes and shifts the responsibility to the international community if states fail. This thesis explains how former colonies have had particular difficulty in meeting this responsibility and often fail to protect their populations from things like severe poverty and human rights abuses including mass atrocity crimes. In former colonies the matter of responsibility is complicated by the residual effects of colonial policies that often leave former colonies impoverished, dependent, socially fragmented and with a limited capacity protect their populations. In addition, foreign and international entities such as global financial institutions and transnational corporations often hold significant power in former colonies and even make decisions regarding national budgets and the use of the military.

This thesis employs a postcolonialist approach to analyze four cases of mass atrocity crimes in Rwanda, Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria. This thesis argues that since, in former colonies, foreign and international entities wield power tantamount to state power they bear responsibility and should be held accountable like states. This thesis also argues that a postcolonial interpretation of the Responsibility to Protect would recognize the implied negative duty of foreign and international entities that possess agency and therefore bear responsibility to not contribute to massive human rights violations namely mass atrocity crimes and hold them accountable if they do.

This dissertation seeks to explain and understand why and how sub-State governments conduct their international relations with external actors, and how federal authorities and local governments coordinate or not in the definition and implementation of the national foreign policy.

It conducts a comprehensive and comparative study of the international relations of sub-State governments (IRSSG) in ten federal systems which are representative of all the regions of the world, stages of economic development and degree of consolidation of their democratic institutions (South Africa (Africa), India and Russia (Asia), Belgium and Germany (Europe), Canada, Mexico, and the United States (North America), Brazil and Argentina (South America), and Australia (Oceania)). It constructs a typology to measure and explain the IRSSG based on the domestic political institutions, especially the constitutional provisions relating foreign affairs and the intergovernmental mechanisms for foreign policy decision making and implementation. Based on the comparative analysis of the ten federations, an in-depth analysis of the Mexican case is done, explaining the variation in the IRSSG of its 32 federal units using economic, political and geographic variables to understand the amount and type of international activities and cooperation mechanisms. This analysis is complemented with the study of the 668 inter-institutional agreements signed by Mexican SSG, a survey applied to the public officials responsible of IRSSG in Mexico, and a case study of Mexico City’s international activities, in order to better understand the preferences, perceptions, capacities, and motivations of Mexican SSG in their internationalization.

There are ten main findings. First, there is a very important variation in the IRSSG and central-local coordination in foreign affairs worldwide. Second, there has been change in the types of central-local coordination during the last decades. Third, the most important causes to conduct IRSSG are globalization, regionalization, and decentralization. Fourth, the democratization variable is a relevant cause for increasing IRSSG in all countries with democracies in process of consolidation; however, it is not as important in the cases of consolidated democracies. Fifth, the predominant motive to conduct IRSSG is to promote local economic development; another important reason is the management border issues; cultural motivation is only relevant in cases where there is cultural variation between SSG. Sixth, institutional creation and building is the norm between SSG to coordinate their international relations; SSG have created ministries or agencies to conduct their international affairs, however, the size, resources, activities and level of consolidation varies considerably between cases. Seventh, there is considerable variation in the international activities conducted by SSG. Eighth, a rationalization of national foreign policy is observed, as the federal government allows SSG to conduct international affairs in those areas where they have powers. Ninth, all countries make a difference between foreign policy (considered an exclusive power and responsibility of the federal government, which includes high politics issues), and international relations or affairs (which include those areas in which SSG have powers, mostly low politics issues). Tenth, all inclusive cases are developed and consolidated parliamentary democracies; all the complementary cases are presidential systems with developing democracies in consolidation (with the exception of the United States); and, the exclusive types have federal systems constitutionally; however, in reality, they function in a very centralized way, practically nullifying federal institutions.

This project examines Russia’s use of force in separatist conflicts in the former Soviet Union revealing that, contrary to what some have suggested, Russia has not pursued master plan to rebuild the Russian Empire or Soviet Union, and has not pursued a foreign policy driven by ethnic nationalism or imperialism. While Russia has maintained military and foreign policy contingencies for engagement in these types of conflicts in the event of crisis, there is little evidence of extensive Russian pre-planning focused on generating “frozen conflicts,” as a central focus of Russian geostrategy. Instead I find that Russia has used unplanned crises, often resulting from security dilemmas, to “freeze” these conflicts in order advance a number of geopolitical goals focused on ensuring the security of Russian state when the opportunity has arisen. The transformation of these conflicts can have the effect of creating a socio-psychological infrastructure that perpetuates gradual, but observable, change in the ethnic identity of separatist de facto states. Russia’s intervention in these conflicts has developed this infrastructure based on the concept of a “Russian World” to which these separatist groups are said to belong. The Russian World serves a tool of Russian foreign policy in that it has replaced the relationship Moscow had with these separatist entities during the Soviet period.

Today’s terrorism threat is global. For this reason, academics and policy makers underscore the importance of a multilateral counterterrorism response. Surprisingly little research examines the determinants of multilateral counterterrorism cooperation. In this study, I employ an original dataset to estimate the determinants of counterterrorism cooperation. I proxy multilateral cooperation in terms of whether governments comply with the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism, an important instrument for stemming the financing of international terrorist activities. What are the determinants of variation in country compliance with financial counterterrorism? To answer this research question, I employ a mixed methods approach. First, I use an ordered logit model to examine several hypotheses in the literature to predict compliance rates, including the magnitude and intensity of violence against the target country and its regime type and capability. I find that across model specifications, United States influence, in terms of bilateral trade, has a highly statistically significant effect on country compliance. Second, I process trace the causal mechanism by examining primary source documents. My findings have several policy implications— mainly that trade is an effective counterterrorism tool.

Debates over the distinctive economic, political and social affordances of the post-industrial age converge in a constellation of intellectual property alternatives. This project maps four paradigmatic agendas for the production and ownership of immaterial property: Information Privatization, Immaterial Exceptionalism, Network Distribution and Ecological De-colonization. I define these paradigms through a tripartite rubric: their ontological foundations, their normative presuppositions and their institutional topologies. Grounded in these four alternatives for the production and ownership of immaterial property, I turn my investigation to the challenge of political community in a post-industrial age. Each paradigm poses a distinct challenge to traditional understandings of political community, as a theoretical proposition and empirical reality. The question of 'Whose Property?' emerges within the normative framework of Critical International Relations Theory. Within this tradition the challenge of political community is to address how political communities institutionalize and express modes of capitalist development. I pose the question of 'Whose Property?' for the purposes both of diagnosis and prognosis. My diagnosis speaks to the challenge of political community in an age of increasing global interdependency, shaped by the logics of post-industrial capitalism. The prognosis, I want to suggest, is that if we conceive political communities as a mode of collective political action, then the varied agendas for intellectual property may provide a powerful motivational argument underpinning emerging modes of political action. They may also offer institutional alternatives that can provide inroads to support the institutional realization of the emancipatory agenda of Critical International Relations Theory. By way of conclusion, this project leaves us with an overarching challenge. In looking at these approaches to intellectual property through the lens of political community, a key transformation manifests itself – the erosion of the Westphalian 'public' and rising demands for pluralized, distributed and globalized Post-Westphalian 'publics'.

Inter-state conflicts are a key area of study in international relations, and have been approached with a variety of techniques, from case studies of individual conflicts, to formal analysis of abstract models and statistical investigations of all such conflicts. In particular, there are a variety of theories as to how states make decisions in the face of conflicts – such as when to threaten force, when to follow through, and when to capitulate to an opponent’s demand. Some scholars have argued that states may be viewed as rational decisionmakers, while others emphasize the role of psychological biases affecting individual leaders. Decisionmaking is challenging to study in part because of its complexity: the decisionmakers may not just be individuals but organizations, following internal procedures and reflecting institutional memory. Furthermore, the decisions are often believed to be strategic, reflecting the decisionmakers’ anticipation of multiple other actors’ potential responses to each possible decision.

In this dissertation, I demonstrate that agent-based models (ABMs) provide a powerful tool to address this complexity, and advance their use as a bridge between different methodologies. Agents in ABMs can be used to represent countries and endowed with a variety of internal decisionmaking models which can operationalize a variety of theories drawn from case studies, psychological experiments or game-theoretic analysis. The specific decision model agents utilize may be changed without altering the sub-models governing how the agents interact with one another. This allows us to simulate the same overall interactions utilizing different decisionmaking theories and observe how the outcomes differ. Furthermore, if these interactions correspond to real-world events, we may directly see how much explanatory or predictive power the outputs of the model variants provide. If one variant’s outputs correspond closer to the empirical data, it provides evidence supporting that variant’s underlying theory.

I implement two agent-based models, extending well-established prior models of international conflict: the International Interaction Game (Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, 1992) and the Expected Utility Model (Bueno de Mesquita, 2002). For each, I start with their original agent decisionmaking models, and develop several variants grounded in relevant theories. I then instantiate the models with historic, empirically-derived data and run them forward to generate sets of simulated outcomes, which I compare to empirical data on the relevant time periods. I find that non-rational models of decisionmaking in the International Interaction Game provide similar explanatory power to the purely rational model, and yield rich satisficing behavior absent in the original model. I also find that the Expected Utility Model variant implementing a Schelling (1966)-inspired model of coercion yields richer dynamics and greater explanatory power than the original model.

In addition to providing evidence in support of particular theories and hypotheses, this work demonstrates the power of the comparative modeling methodology in studying international conflict. Future work will involve adding more statistical controls to the model output analysis, comparative analysis between the outputs of the two overall models, and extension of the decisionmaking models for each. The same methodology may also be expanded to other formal and computational models of international relations, and social science more broadly.