Description
Abstract
What is the nature of the U.S. humanitarian intervention policy? Security scholars have wrestled with this question since the institutionalization of human rights. At times, the answer seems clear when pundits and policymakers claim that 'politics stops at the wa- ter's edge.' These widely cited words mean that when it comes to the use of force, U.S. political leaders speak with one voice. Critics argue that 'sailing the water's edge' is what American leaders do. Yet as I demonstrate in this study, U.S. decision-makers engage in two-level games played simultaneously at the domestic and international level. This pa- per examines the interaction among four sets of institutional players in a two-level game: the President, the Congress, the bureaucratic politics, and the UN-Security Council. It analyzes the effects that material interests and ideological divisions, interactions, and institutions have on humanitarian intervention decisions. I use a multimethod research design to explain the U.S. humanitarian intervention policy. Focusing on a mixture of game theory and causal inference, I use the game theory to generate inductive representations of U.S. humanitarian intervention decision making, which I then empirically test via the statistics of causal inference.
