Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'History, Politics and International Relations'

What explains the tendency of counterinsurgents to adopt and retain ineffective strategies? Under what conditions do counterinsurgents replace ineffective strategies and what factors shape the strategies eventually adopted? While most studies explaining poor counterinsurgent performance focus on the preferences and pathologies of military organizations, I shift attention to civilian policymakers, explaining strategic choice as the product of their political preferences and the wider political and grand strategic pressures they face. By distinguishing between policymaking principals and bureaucratic agents tasked with implementing strategy, two challenges to successful adaptation can be identified: the challenge of decision, in which policymakers must overcome pressures to retain existing strategies, and implementation, in which policymakers must ensure agents tasked with implementing strategy comply with strategic directives. A solution to each is individually necessary, and together they are jointly sufficient for adaptation.

Counterinsurgency strategy is selected by policymaking principals who arbitrate between the competing recommendations of their bureaucratic agents and advisors. Because policymaker preferences are shaped by their wide responsibilities, an important determinant of counterinsurgency strategy is to be found in the way strategy impacts policymakers' core interests, notably their wider foreign policy objectives and their political security, both of which shape the objectives and strategies of a counterinsurgency campaign. As long as the political and geostrategic pressures that led counterinsurgents to select current strategies persist, counterinsurgents retain ineffective strategy. When domestic political or geostrategic changes lead policymakers to perceive that existing strategies have become liabilities for these higher priority issues, their preferences shift in favor of alternate strategies. Policymakers also face the challenge of ensuring all agents implement policymakers' preferred strategy rather than pursue their own preferred ends using their preferred means. The most effective solution is to empower a single agent, whose preferences most closely align with those of policymakers, to direct the campaign.

I combine comparative analysis and process tracing, drawing on case studies from the 20^th century British Empire. Beginning in the British Mandate for Palestine, I draw on a most similar comparison of two phases of the Palestinian Rebellion (1936, 1937-39) and the Jewish Rebellion (1945-1947), each demonstrating a different outcome: 1936 represents a case of successful decision but failed implementation; 1938 represents a case of successful decision and successful implementation; and 1946-7 represents a case of failed decision. Each is then matched to a most-different extension from Malaya and Ireland.

The emerging global structure is wrought with tension. The contemporary international system, marshaled by the communications-and-information revolution and characterized by dense interaction capacities among transnational actors, can be conceived as a global society wherein a common normative framework guides and constrains state behavior. Its intersection with revisionist rising powers harboring intentions to mold that framework to reflect their own preferences risks an ambiguous standard of behavior, confusion, and a clash of norms that threatens to transform the cohesion that underpins accord in the global society into chaos. As the state upon whose values and principles the existing international system is based upon, it is the responsibility of the United States to ensure the stability and viability of that system and – as far as other states are expected to conform to the normative standards thereof – its ability to accommodate the development of the states within it. The United States has traditionally promoted the democratic peace as the key stabilizing mechanism in the international system. While fully institutionalized democracies may be more stable and less aggressive than other forms of government, however, emerging democracies tend to be extraordinarily violent as self-rule precipitates secessionist wars, pathological homogenization, and ethnic cleansing as “the people” are defined and those excluded are sorted out. In regions beset by the legacies of colonialism and multi-ethnic empires, wherein state boundaries were arbitrarily drawn to aggregate and divide a complex mosaic of social identity groups, the results are national cascades fueling pervasive identity-driven conflict in a struggle to reify into the primary organizing structure of modernity: the nation-state.

The Sino-Indian relationship marked by mutual mistrust for the last six decades has seen definitive changes since the late 1980s. Though considerable issues remain unresolved, the two have begun establishing mechanisms to establish a certain level of trust that began with the visit of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to Beijing in 1988. The paper analyzes recent literature on this relationship and finds them predicting two outcomes primarily - either one where India admits Chinese supremacy and kowtows to it, or one that foresees increased clashes between the two. Neither outcome takes into account the complex association that the two nations are building guided by a series of frameworks, mechanisms and agreements. This paper posits that in the evolutionary arc of interstate relations, Sino-Indian relations have not reached a point where only one of the two options - cooperation and competition, will be chosen. This paper argues that economic interests of the two rising powers is behind the present behavior where the two are courting each other but at the same time, preparing for the other's rise. Both countries consider their economic identity to be primary and do not want to be distracted from the key national goal of economic development. They are particularly careful that their disagreements with each other do not come in the way of this goal. The paper analyzes the various frameworks and suggests that they are created with this end in consideration. Both India and China aim to continue collaboration in economic matters bilaterally or in international issues of mutual interest even when they don't see eye to eye on disputes left over from history. It is likely that competition will at times get the better of cooperation, driven by factors like strategic influence in the neighborhood, finding newer providers of energy as well as markets for their goods and services. But periodic flare-ups notwithstanding, in the absence of serious provocations, the two countries will avoid clashes that can escalate. The paper also analyzes certain black-swan events that might disturb the balancing act. Incidents like the death of the Dalai Lama creating a vacuum within the Tibetan leadership is one such scenario; a terrorist attack on India planned and executed form Pakistan like the one in Mumbai in 2008 is another. However, the presence of multiple bilateral platforms will continue to automatically insulate alternate channels of communication even in these situations. In conclusion, the paper suggests that as they grow, India and China will continue to engage each other at several levels, competing and cooperation, deterring and reassuring each other at once.

This dissertation chronicles the role of airpower as a focal point in the evolution of the hawk vs. dove dynamic in American politics. It accounts for the relationship between changes in the viability of aerial weapons technologies and the general commitment of elected officials to expand or restrict the standing and use of hard power as a foreign policy tool. By comparing and contrasting the aftermath of two main paradigms of conflict -- the post-Vietnam era and the post-9/11 era -- it shows how disagreement over the size, scope, and role of the nation’s armed forces has changed amid the introduction of airpower technologies that have in many cases been developed to mitigate the increasing level of conflict asymmetry witnessed by the transition from one strategic threat environment to the next. Accordingly, the analysis follows a basic chronology of comparative case study: first it examines the waning years of the Vietnam War through to the years following its conclusion, establishing a baseline for the character of the hawk/ dove dynamic amid a mindset of mostly conventional conflict before proceeding to the post-9/11 era, evaluating how trends in the hawk/ dove debate have shifted in an age of extreme asymmetry and non-linear battlefields. The lion’s share of the research analyzes legislative voting data on the U.S. Congress from 1964-2012 to visually chart how the hawk/ dove dynamic has fluctuated over time in terms of its intensity, primary focal point(s), and the balance of the dynamic. Seven litmus tests are identified as individual moving parts: 1) airpower policy, 2) defense spending in general, 3) (de)escalation of conflict, 4) foreign military aid, 5) WMD policy, 6) war powers/ inter-branch relations, and 7) NASA support as part of air and space power. Providing a quantitative basis for analysis, the findings are revealed along with contextual points of interest found in the public communication of key intellectual leaders (including those in the executive branch). Taken together, the research offers a comprehensive view into the evolving debate over peace and war in an age of rapidly-advancing airpower systems used in increasingly asymmetrical conflict.

This dissertation explores the evolution of political activism among Haitians in the United States from the formation of Haitian New York in the late 1950s to the return of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti in 1994. It traces the efforts of Haitian activists to build bridges connecting New York and Miami to the grassroots organizations in Haiti, finding a considerable degree of success in their efforts to construct a transnational movement that had a substantial impact both in Haiti and in the United States. Shedding additional light on the interconnected history of Haiti and the United States, this dissertation also adds to the growing historiography on immigrant activism and international campaigns for democracy and human rights.

At the outset, politics in Haitian New York was splintered among competing factions, though by the early 1970s there began to form a somewhat unified anti-Duvalier opposition movement. The arrival of the Haitian "boat people" in South Florida in the early 1970s continued the evolution of Haitian politics in the United States, triggering a refugee crisis that drew the attention of the activists in New York and forcing a reconsideration of political vision and strategy that had previously been solely concerned with the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship. The grassroots resistance in Haiti and in the United States saw a slight opening with the arrival of President Jimmy Carter, but with Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, came a wave of repression in Haiti and stringent new policies toward Haitian refugees. The uprisings of 1985 and 1986 that toppled the Duvalier dictatorship transformed Haitian politics at home and abroad, enabling an expanded and tightened network of activism connecting New York, Miami, and Haiti, which grew from 1987 to 1989. The years 1990 and 1991 were the pinnacle moment for the linked popular movements in New York, Miami, and Haiti, though Haitian activists were soon forced to pour their energy into the overlapping campaigns aimed at reversing the coup against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and defending the new wave of refugees that the coup produced.