Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2024, International and Comparative Politics

In 1948, the international community came together and promised to “prevent and punish” genocides under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention). Despite the Genocide Convention's commitment to humanitarian intervention, states are selective and inconsistent in intervention. While there are many case studies done on state motivation for intervention, statistical studies are rarely done and a system for predicting what variables will likely produce humanitarian intervention on a wide scale has not been explored. This study uses a Cross-Sectional Time Series Estimator Model to track whether states were more likely to intervene in genocides over time since signing the Genocide Convention. It also tested whether valuable goods and shared borders made states more prone to intervention. The results concluded that the Genocide Convention has no correlation to states willingness to intervene in genocides. It also did not provide evidence that valuable goods are a factor in humanitarian intervention. The test did support the hypothesis that shared borders make states more likely to intervene in genocides. Future studies should focus on increasing the data pool to include more genocides and testing more variables in hopes of creating a system to predict humanitarian intervention in genocides.

Committee: Liam Anderson Ph.D. (Advisor); Vaughn Shannon Ph.D. (Committee Member); Carlos Costa Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: International Relations; Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Political Science

What factors appear influential to U.S. decisions of armed humanitarian intervention and nonintervention? Utilizing the “story model” mode of problem representation first utilized by psychologists Pennington and Hastie (1986; 1988) and adapted to the domain of foreign policy by Sylvan and Charlick-Paley (2000), this research seeks to answer this question by exploring how top decision makers within the Bush and Clinton administrations collectively represented problems in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia in the early to mid-nineteen nineties. In particular, it explores whether decisions of armed humanitarian intervention and nonintervention appear linked to: (1) the invocation of historical analogies, (2) perceptions of threats and or opportunities to vital national interests, (3) perceived moral/legal imperatives, (4) pressure and interests related to domestic actors, such as the Congress, the public and the media, (5) institutional pressures and interests pertaining to U.S. membership in international organizations or alliances, such as NATO and or the United Nations, (6) the perceived relative ease and utility of intervention, and (7) vested military interests. An analysis of the collective elite discourse and evolving representations (or “stories”) of each crisis reveals, among other things, that decisions of armed humanitarian intervention and nonintervention appear strongly linked to perceived pressure and interests pertaining to U.S. membership in international institutions, such as the United Nations and NATO and to perceptions of the relative ease and utility of such intervention. In addition, although analogies appear to influence and constrain elite representations of problems, they were invoked in the discourse in a piecemeal as opposed to a holistic fashion. Meanwhile analogies of past foreign policy “failures” and “successes” did not appear to correlate with decisions of armed humanitarian intervention and nonintervention as originally posited, although a corr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Donald Sylvan (Advisor) Subjects: