Description
Abstract
What is the nature of U.S. humanitarian intervention policy? Security scholars have wrestled with this question since the institutionalization of human rights has moved to the international political agenda. At times, the answer seems clear when pundits, policymakers, and activists claim that 'politics stops at the waters age.' This widely cited words stand for the idea that when it comes to the use of force, U.S. political leaders speak with one voice. Critics argue that such claims have no traction because intervention is almost always politically contested. Yet as I demonstrate in this study, U.S. political leaders engage in two-level games played simultaneously at the domestic and international level. This study examines the interaction among four sets of institutional players in a two-level game: the president, the congress, the UN-Security Council, and the bureaucratic politics. It analyzes the effects that material interests and ideological devisions, interactions, and institutions have on humanitarian intervention decisions. I use a multimethod research design to explain the U.S. humanitarian intervention policy. I focus on the mixture of game theory and case studies. The game theory I use to generate deductive representations of U.S. humanitarian intervention decision making, which I then empirically test via process tracing.
