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The literature on escalation situations and audience costs suggests that democratic executives tend to increase commitment to a foreign policy in response to negative feedback. However, real-world cases from international politics suggest otherwise. Specifically, executives do not appear to respond uniformly to failing situations. While scholars have begun to unravel the audience cost mechanism, up until know, we know little about reasons for the variation in how executives use policy feedback to update commitment to a foreign policy. In this dissertation, I adopt an integrative approach and present a model of sequential decision-making that explains the conditions under which leaders escalate and de-escalate commitment in response to feedback. I attempt to break down the audience cost mechanism to explain why democratic executives do not respond uniformly to negative feedback. While the literature on the escalation of commitment suggests decision-makers tend to increase investment in the face of negative feedback, my theory suggests that under certain conditions, executives may find it politically advantageous to back down from a failing policy. My theory emphasizes the relationship between citizens, executives, and foreign policy effectiveness. Next, I suggest that the foreign policy tool of military intervention provides a suitable test case for a theory of sequential decision-making. I first test hypotheses derived from the theory regarding the preference formation process of democratic citizens during the course of such an episode. Understanding the response of citizens to feedback is an important first step to understanding the updating decisions of democratic executives. While previous work has relied on aggregate survey data, experimentation provides me with the ability to analyze how an individual citizen?s preference over commitment is impacted by policy feedback. The results of the experimental analyses suggest that citizens act as investors: they favor increasing commitment to military interventions when viewing negative feedback, up to a point. I then test the main hypotheses derived from the theory regarding executive decision-making on a dataset of major power military interventions from 1960-2000. Overall, the results support the hypotheses: public approval conditions the manner in which executives use feedback to update intervention commitments. In the conclusion, I summarize the study by highlighting key results, present the broad implications for the study of democratic foreign policy making, and discuss avenues for future research.

Les études académiques récentes sur l'influence de l'opinion publique sur les interventions militaires dans les démocraties occidentales concluent pour la plupart que l’opposition du public n’a pas empêché le président de faire usage de la force. Ces études se concentrent souvent sur le choix d'intervenir dans un conflit donné et omettent d'analyser les ajustements apportés à l'intervention elle-même du fait de l'opinion publique. Cette étude tente au contraire de montrer qu'on ne peut comprendre l’influence de l'opinion publique si l'on se limite à la décision d'intervenir et n’étudie pas les décisions connexes liées à la conduite et à la réussite d'une intervention: le choix des moyens humains et financiers, les objectifs, la stratégie de communication. La littérature scientifique actuelle omet également de dévoiler la manière dont l'exécutif tente de gérer la contrainte de l'opinion publique et comprendre ainsi quelle est sa véritable marge de manœuvre vis-à-vis de celle-ci. En effet, l’opinion publique et la présidence s’influencent mutuellement : le président est souvent contraint de trouver un compromis entre les objectifs politiques et militaires désirés et ce que le public est prêt à accepter. En incluant l'impact de l'opinion publique sur la mise en œuvre des opérations militaires, cette recherche conclut que le public américain a eu une influence majeure sur le degré d'engagement, les objectifs et la durée des interventions militaires de l'après Guerre froide. Notre étude s’appuie principalement sur des entretiens avec des responsables politiques impliqués dans le processus décisionnel ayant conduit à l’usage de la force après la Guerre froide. Ce processus décisionnel sera analysé à travers cinq études de cas. / Recent qualitative studies of the relationship between public opinion and U.S. foreign policy put decisions into the following two categories: the President tends to lead or to follow public opinion; public opinion influences decision-making, constrains the decision, or has no impact. These studies typically research the initial decision to intervene, but fail to examine the subsequent decisions to sustain and win a war: financial and human means, conduct, objectives, duration, and communication. I argue that these elements of a winning strategy are impacted by concerns with public support at home. The impact of public opinion on the decision whether to use force is better understood when analyzing the compromise between the perception of anticipated public opinion and the necessities of a military campaign. Public opinion impacts the strategy, the timing, and length of an intervention, and inversely, those elements impact the anticipated public opinion and ultimately the decision to use force or choose a different course of action. The president can expect to influence public opinion and raise the acceptability of an intervention through various means. As a consequence, there is a back-and-forth process between anticipated public support for a given intervention and the consideration of the use of force. Contrary to the current literature, which tends to conclude that the president enjoys a substantial margin for maneuver, an analysis of post Cold War cases of interventions, limited interventions, and military escalations shows that anticipated public opinion limited the president's margin for maneuver and influenced not only the decision to intervene but also the military strategy and in the end, the result of the intervention. These findings contradict the realist paradigm for which only the structure of the international system matters and domestic politics are irrelevant in the study of international relations.

Scholars widely acknowledge that democratic political leaders seek public support for their policy endeavors, particularly when conducting costly policies as in the case of military interventions. A deeper understanding of the factors that affect public support for military interventions is crucial to explaining more definitively the determinants of foreign policy decisions regarding military interventions. However, most studies in this area of research examine the public as an undifferentiated mass that reacts uniformly to changes in the course of an intervention. In addition, scholars often overlook the varying dynamics of public support across different phases of a military intervention. Given these shortcomings in the literature, the objective of this dissertation is to examine the formation of public support as a function of political information levels and intervention stages. This dissertation is important in both methodological and theoretical terms. Methodologically, the major contribution of my dissertation is the adoption of a multimethod approach that is almost non-existent in this line of research. By bringing together a formal framework, experimentation, and statistical analyses of public opinion survey data, I develop a more refined theory and attain more robust empirical results. Theoretically, the study challenges the dominant mode of research on military interventions in which public opinion is treated as a homogenous mass. Specifically, I explore how major factors related to public support for military interventions (such as casualty rates) play different roles and weigh differently in their impact on the opinions of politically informed versus less informed individuals across stages of an intervention. The results of the experiments and survey data analyses demonstrate that politically informed individuals express less support for a military intervention at the starting (rally) phase of that intervention compared to the less informed. That said, as the intervention proceeds and casualties are incurred, support of politically uninformed individuals decreases at higher rates than does support of politically informed ones. In other words, politically informed individuals demonstrate more stable levels of support across intervention stages. In addition, both experimental and survey data analyses show that policy-specific information is generally a more influential factor on public support for military interventions compared to general political information.

The concept of Humanitarian Military Interventions has become a core issue within the international community since the 1990s. Human rights violations carried out on a massive scale are no longer perceived as purely domestic concerns but are now recognized as a central concern of the international community. This study of four cases of HMI -Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and East Timor- is intended to shed the light on two political factors that play a determining role in HMI: the national interests of the interveners and the level of neutrality of the operations. I argue that the level of success of HMI is highly dependent on the presence of national interests in the region for the interveners and a low level of neutrality. This thesis also reflects on the ongoing challenges facing the international community regarding the most efficient ways to address massive human rights violations and presents suggestions towards addressing them.

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Over the last two decades the frequency of humanitarian interventions in Africa, delivered by a wide range of actors, has increased. The British military intervention in the Sierra Leonean civil war in the early 2000s is often cited as an example of successful intervention and solidified Security Sector Reform (SSR) as a key component of state-building and development. Yet in-depth analysis of the long-term legacies of this ‘successful’ intervention are sparse and there remains a notable dearth in research exploring the British involvement from the perspectives of those directly involved or affected. This qualitative research provides a novel outlook by exploring micro-level experiences, thus addressing this lacuna through examining the legacies within Sierra Leone and in British foreign policy from an experiential perspective. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is used as a framework in order to draw out implications for global intervention practice, as arguably R2P must also be accompanied by a responsibility to fully understand the legacy of this social phenomenon. A themed analysis of original data explores the link between official narratives and the perspectives of those on the ground, often exposing a disconnect and identifying important nuances within the interpretation of the success of the British intervention. Through a critical analysis of these experiences significant questions are raised regarding the dynamics between intervening forces and the affected population; perceptions of legitimacy; accountability; and the implications for R2P more broadly.

This thesis explores the impact of Western military interventions on the occurrence and motivations of female suicide bombers in Iraq, by utilizing a single case study method combined with Structured, Focused Comparison. The thesis examined the period before-and-after the 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq. The reserach identifies a significant increase in the use of female suicide bombers post-intervention, correlating this rise with intensified grievances, personal loss, and cases of sexual exploitation and abuse. The research analyzes the strategic, social and individual logics influencing these motivations. Findings suggest that Western military interventions exacerbate conditions leading to the radicalization and mobilization of women as suicide bombers, driven by a combination of personal trauma, societal pressure, and strategic aims to coerce foreign powers.

Why do some international actors who intervene militarily in civil wars continue their military engagement after the war has ended, while other actors end their intervention and withdraw all military forces at the conclusion of the war? What explains the continuation of outside military intervention from wartime to peacetime, and why might this dimension of military intervention vary across conflicts? In analyzing this puzzle, this study introduces a new theoretical concept: persistent intervention. Defined as the continuation of an external state’s military intervention in a civil war after the war ends, the concept of persistent intervention sheds light on the connections between wartime and peacetime, or the post-conflict period. Drawing on a new dataset on post-war interventions across the globe in countries experiencing civil wars that ended between 1957-2020, as well as detailed comparative case studies of four interventions from the Middle East and Africa, this dissertation finds the availability and access to political and economic gains of the intervention as the main driver of the decision to keep troops in peacetime. The domestic elites' desire to protect these predatory gains from the intervention leaves some interveners entangled in the civil war country, where leaving too soon might devalue and destabilize the investments. The primary factor undermining persistent interventions is found to be intervener domestic instability that disrupts this extractive mechanism. Findings also have implications for external involvement in peace agreements and peacekeeping operations. / Political Science

In the beginning of April 2011, the Swedish parliament decided to participate in the NATO-led intervention in Libya. The purpose of the intervention was to maintain a no-fly zone, protect civilians and to create an arms embargo. The aim of this thesis is to describe how the Swedish participation was motivated by the Swedish decision-makers in the parliament. It also aims at exploring the possible motives behind the decision to participate, through different theoretical perspectives such as realism, liberalism and constructivism. This was done with an idea analysis where motivations and motives were searched for primarily in the government proposition and the parliament debate concerning the participation. Other sources that were used to explore possible motives were the Swedish department of defense, previous research and newspapers. My findings shows that the Swedish decision to participate in the Libya-intervention was mainly motivated with liberal ideas. They also show that the motives could be many, but the most probable were the liberal ones which likely can be traced to the Swedish national identity.