Direct Response Television (DRTV) programming for child sponsorship is an extremely effective form of fundraising in Canada. However, it also proves to be one way in which racialized knowledge is being reproduced. This project deconstructs the DRTV for three child-sponsorship NGOs: World Vision Canada, Plan Canada, and Christian Children's Fund. What the analysis reveals is a type of advertising dependent on antiquated dynamics of colonial dominance between Canada and Africa. This project also explores the reasons for its success despite Canada's anti-racist rhetoric. Drawing from the works of Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Fances Henry and Carol Tator, and others, this study draws conclusions about the cultural identity of the Canadian mainstream, and proposes critical consumption and the questioning of sociocultural norms as a way forward.

Following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iraq invaded Iran resulting in a costly war from 1980 to 1988, which threatened American interests in the Persian Gulf. From the outset, the stated official American policy was strict neutrality, but this was not the case. The war had provided the United States with an opportunity to improve relations with Iraq, particularly alter Iran reversed the Iraqi invasion in the summer of 1982. Because the Reagan administration could not let Iraq collapse, the United States tilted heavily towards Iraq in defiance of its stated policy. Interestingly, the tilt towards Iraq did not stop the Reagan administration from secretly dealing with Iran in 1985. Consequently, the disclosure of these dealings resulted in the buildup of American naval forces in the region to protect the shipment of oil, and eventually the use of force to end the conflict in 1988.

Since his first term, Franklin D. Roosevelt presented the Good Neighbor Policy as a remedy for past wrongs (such as military intervention) done to Latin America. After 1935, however, Roosevelt used the Good Neighbor Policy to achieve his internationalist goals in the realm of economic and military cooperation. Part I, dealing with economics, shows that the Roosevelt administration began waging economic warfare in Europe, the Far East and the Americas against the revisionist powers as early as 1934 and that the trade offensive in Latin America was part of a wider policy of economic aggression. Part II argues that the Roosevelt administration actively sought Latin America's cooperation in military matters after 1935. As this thesis will show, the Roosevelt administration was interested in Latin America's strategic location because of its close proximity to the West African coast and as producer of strategic raw materials. Therefore, Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy sought to establish bases in Latin America to secure supply routes to Africa and to integrate Latin America's primary economy into the U.S. war economy.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s behavior during the War on Terror represents a stark contrast from how the Court has previously viewed its responsibilities during wartime, especially as they relate to the treatment of noncitizens detained abroad. The Court has traditionally avoided questioning presidential policies on the capture and detention of suspected enemies during times of conflict. It has used its control over its own docket to refuse review of lower-court decisions dismissing challenges to foreign-policy decisions based on dubious claims of their involving “political questions” or being outside the domain of judicial authority. And, until the War on Terror, it drew a bright-line rule that seemed to categorically exclude noncitizens detained abroad from constitutional protection. However, in a series of cases from 2004 to 2008, the Court reversed its World War II–era doctrines that had permitted the federal government extensive discretion in its treatment of detainees captured during times of hostilities. The culmination of these decisions was its 2008 holding that foreign nationals detained at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to habeas corpus hearings to challenge their detentions. This dissertation provides a normative defense of the Court’s decision-making process in its War on Terror habeas corpus cases. It reconstructs and analyzes the Court’s central arguments and shows the ethical significance of its assertion of an important judicial role in overseeing executive detention during wartime. In the process, it also provides an explanation and defense of the Court’s decision to stray from its World War II–era doctrines limiting the reach of the writ of habeas corpus and, by extension, of the Court’s ability to step in and defend the rights of foreign nationals abroad. / Government

This dissertation presents three studies that evaluate different strategies for addressing transnational health threats and social inequalities that depend upon or would benefit from global collective action. Each draws upon different academic disciplines, methods and epistemological traditions. Chapter 1 assesses the role of international law in addressing global health challenges, specifically examining when, how and why global health treaties may be helpful. Evidence from 90 quantitative impact evaluations of past treaties was synthesized to uncover what impact can be expected from global health treaties, and based on these results, an analytic framework was developed to help determine when proposals for new global health treaties have reasonable prospects for yielding net positive effects. Findings from the evidence synthesis suggest that treaties consistently succeed in shaping economic matters and consistently fail in achieving social progress. There are three differences between these domains which point to design characteristics that new global health treaties can incorporate to achieve positive impact: 1) incentives for those with power to act upon them; 2) institutions designed to bring edicts into effect; and 3) interests advocating for their negotiation, adoption, ratification and domestic implementation. The chapter concludes by presenting an analytic framework and four criteria for determining which proposals for new global health treaties should be pursued. First, there must be a significant transnational dimension to the problem being addressed. Second, the goals should justify the coercive nature of treaties. Third, proposed global health treaties should have a reasonable chance of achieving benefits. Fourth, treaties should be the best commitment mechanism among the many competing alternatives. Applying this analytic framework to nine recent calls for new global health treaties reveals that none fully meet the four criteria. This finding suggests that efforts aiming to better utilize or revise existing international instruments may be more productive than advocating for new treaties. The one exception is the additional transnational health threat of antimicrobial resistance, which probably meets all four criteria. Chapter 2 builds on this work by evaluating a broad range of opportunities for working towards global collective action on antimicrobial resistance. Access to antimicrobials and the sustainability of their effectiveness are undermined by deep-seated failures in both global governance and global markets. These failures can be conceptualized as political economy challenges unique to each antimicrobial policy goal, including global commons dilemmas, negative externalities, unrealized positive externalities, coordination issues and free-rider problems. Many actors, instruments and initiatives that form part of the global antimicrobial regime are addressing these challenges, yet they are insufficiently coordinated, compliant, led or financed. Taking an evidence-based approach to global strategy reveals at least ten options for promoting collective action on antimicrobial access, conservation and innovation, including those that involve building institutions, crafting incentives and mobilizing interests. While no single option is individually sufficient to tackle all political economy challenges facing the global antimicrobial regime, the most promising options seem to be monitored milestones (institution), an inter-agency task force (institution), a global pooled fund (incentive) and a special representative (interest mobilizer), perhaps with an international antimicrobial treaty driving forward their implementation. Whichever are chosen, this chapter argues that their real-world impact will depend on strong accountability relationships and robust accountability mechanisms that facilitate transparency, oversight, complaint, and enforcement. Such relationships and mechanisms, if designed properly, can promote compliance and help bring about the changes that the negotiators of any new international agreement on antimicrobial resistance will likely be aspiring to achieve. Progress should be possible if only we find the right mix of options matched with the right forum and accountability mechanisms, and if we make this grand bargain politically possible by ensuring it simultaneously addresses all three imperatives for antimicrobials – namely access, conservation and innovation. Chapter 3 takes this dissertation beyond traditional Westphalian notions of collective action by exploring whether new disruptive technologies like cheap supercomputers, open-access statistical software, and canned packages for machine learning can theoretically provide the same global regulatory effects on health matters as state-negotiated international agreements. This kind of “techno-regulation” may be especially helpful for issues and areas of activity that are hard to control or where governments cannot reach. One example is news media coverage of health issues, which is currently far from optimal – especially during crises like pandemics – and which may be difficult to regulate through traditional strategies given constitutional freedoms of expression and the press. But techno-regulating news media coverage might be possible if there was a feasible way of automatically measuring desirable attributes of news records in real-time and disseminating the results widely, thereby incentivizing news media organizations to compete for better scores and reputational advantage. As a first move, this third chapter presents a relatively simple maximum entropy machine-learning model that automatically quantifies the relevance, scientific quality and sensationalism of news media records, and validates the model on a corpus of 163,433 news records mentioning the recent SARS and H1N1 pandemics. This involved optimizing retrieval of relevant news records, using specially tailored tools for scoring these qualities on a randomly sampled training set of 500 news records, processing the training set into a document-term matrix, utilizing a maximum entropy model for inductive machine learning to identify relationships that distinguish differently scored news records, computationally applying these relationships to classify other news records, and validating the model using a test set that compares computer and human judgments. Estimates of overall scientific quality and sensationalism based on the 500 human-scored news records were 3.17 (“potentially important but not critical shortcomings”) and 1.81 (“not too much sensationalizing”) out of 5, respectively, and updated by the computer model to 3.32 and 1.73 out of 5 after including information from 10,000 records. This confirms that news media coverage of pandemic outbreaks is far from perfect, especially its scientific quality if not also its sensationalism. The accuracy of computer scoring of individual news records for relevance, quality and sensationalism was 86%, 65% and 73%, respectively. The chapter concludes by arguing that these findings demonstrate how automated methods can evaluate news records faster, cheaper and possibly better than humans – suggesting that techno-regulating health news coverage is feasible – and that the specific procedure implemented in this study can at the very least identify subsets of news records that are far more likely to have particular scientific and discursive qualities. Prospects for achieving global collective action on transnational health threats and social inequalities would be improved if greater efforts were taken to systematically take stock of the full-range of strategies available and to scientifically evaluate their potential effectiveness. This dissertation presents three studies that do so, which together showcase the diversity of approaches that can be mustered in pursuit of this goal. / Health Policy

My dissertation argues that the United States and China employ diplomacy to secure international cooperation, but that their domestic politics render it more elusive. International relations theory regards talk as cheap. It argues that states cannot employ verbal communication to overcome structural conditions that ostensibly favor conflict. Can a security-seeking state use diplomacy to affect another’s assessment of shared interests and elicit substantive cooperation? To answer this question, my first paper analyzes original datasets of US-China diplomatic exchanges and American assessments of shared interests with China. I find that, as diplomats have long observed, diplomacy is a forum for states to exchange concessions that render both sides better off. Chinese diplomacy improves American assessments of shared interests and increases the probability of bilateral cooperation. My second paper develops a theory of diversionary aggression in autocracies. When rent transfers to political elites decline, leadership challenges become more likely. Autocrats may inoculate themselves against these challenges by courting popular support with diversionary foreign policy and nationalist propaganda. Using original data on elite transfers, diplomatic interactions, and propaganda from China, I find broad support for the theory. As much as 40% of China’s conflict initiation toward the United States appears to be diversionary. My third paper argues that American congressional politics reduce the president’s ability to secure international cooperation. Using an original dataset of legislative hostility toward China, I find that when Congress introduces legislation hostile to China, China penalizes the president by reducing its willingness to cooperate by a factor of four. Most broadly, these results suggest that the benefits accorded to democracies in international relations may be circumscribed under some conditions. / Government

Since the end of decolonization, African states have created a series of dense and overlapping international organizations (IOs) at both the continental (Organization of African Unity/African Union) and sub-regional (regional economic community, REC) levels of analysis, both of which broadly claim to fulfill similar mandates on a range of issues, including the provision of collective security. Given that every African state is embedded within at least two African IOs with similar mandates – which have generally been assumed to be important primarily for the accomplishment of collective goals – how, when, and why do individual African states understand when such IOs might be strategically useful for the pursuit of their individual security and foreign policy aims, especially as relates to national security interests? To answer this question, this dissertation creates a theory of how African states understand the strategic utility of African IOs in relation to the pursuits of their national security interests, which it tests against the historical record of actual state behavior in eight countries in a combination of West Africa and the Greater Horn. Ultimately, it shows that with the knowledge of four variables – a state’s international power projection capability; its location within regional and continental IO polarities; and the nature of the national security interest at hand – one can broadly predict when, why, and in which African IOs states will pursue their individual national security interests. / African and African American Studies

This dissertation explores the political economy of Turkey’s large-scale health systems reform, known as the Health Transformation Program (HTP) (2003 – 2012). It does this by analyzing the role of institutions, physicians, and patients in the Ministry of Health’s efforts to adopt and implement changes to the country’s health financing, health workforce, and primary care systems. In the first chapter, I present a qualitative case study that uses primary interview data to explain how Turkey adopted a universal and unified health coverage system between 2003 and 2008. By applying Immergut’s institutional veto points theory, I show Minister of Health Akdağ (2002-2013) and his team of advisors used targeted strategies to overcome obstacles at critical veto points blocking adoption. This analysis fills an important gap in the literature on universal health coverage by providing a theory-based explanation for how a reform can be accomplished. The second paper then looks at how Minister Akdağ overcame opposition from an organized physician group, the Turkish Medical Association (TMA), to adopt legislation that banned physician dual practice. This analysis contributes to the literature on the role of physicians in health reform by presenting a case study where an organized physicians association was not able to act exert veto power to block policy adoption. Rather, I argue that Minister Akdağ used a divide and then conquer political strategy, where he acted to exploit coordination problems among physicians by appealing to their individual interests and undermining the authority of TMA and its base of university physicians, to create a favorable political environment to ban dual practice and strengthen service delivery capacity. The fourth chapter considers how the HTP affected public opinion of Turkey’s reformed primary health care system, known as the Family Medicine System. I take advantage of the staged-rolled out of the Family Medicine System at the provincial level to estimate its effect on patient satisfaction using provincially-representative patient exit survey data from 2010, 2011 and 2012. This study provides some of the first national level evidence that primary health care reform underpinned by the FM system can effectively improve patient satisfaction - a health system goal. The final chapter summarizes the main results of Chapters 2, 3, and 4, discusses their limitations, and presents policy implications that can be derived from this research. / Global Health and Population

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.