In the dominant Realist paradigm of international relations theory

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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Today’s international community is engaging in a new kind of arms control, which parts ways with past practice to privilege humanitarian concerns and civilian protections over perceived national security interests. Humanitarian disarmament has resulted in multiple multilateral agreements in recent years banning exceptionally injurious or unnecessarily harmful weapons. Existing arguments, which emphasize international pressure or norm diffusion as explicating policy change, cannot fully explain governments’ mixed reception to the humanitarian disarmament approach. They neglect the process by which persuasive action at the domestic level impacts policy-making, that can result in the legalization of new humanitarian norms. Through the examination of four states involved to varying degrees with the cluster munition disarmament process, this dissertation contributes a new theory of this domestic campaign pressure process. It shows that where civil society groups are able to run a well-resourced, organized domestic campaign that increases the issue’s salience and activate public participation in application of political leverage, disarmament policy change is likeliest to occur. States that join agreements as a result of this process do so for instrumental rather than normative reasons, but in self-imposing new weapons bans, reticent governments ultimately contribute to the humanizing of the laws of war. / Political Science

This study investigates employees' perceptions of the quality of work life in a large northeastern university. Two issues are central to the investigation, organizational commitment and job satisfaction. The latter indicator is examined on two levels--global job satisfaction and facet-specific satisfaction. Interest in the area of Quality of Work Life has increased in the past several years. The literature in this area, however, does not provide comprehensive guidance to implement such a program. Furthermore, studies on organizational commitment and job satisfaction hve tended to focus on samples of only a few occupations or broad national surveys. Thus, the literature is lacking in intraorganizational studies which compare occupational levels. The research in this study is presented in two sections. Part 1 examines the organizational commitment of the employees in two ways: (1) the sample as a whole and (2) separate analyses for each of eight occupational levels. Part 2 gauges satisfaction among this organization's employees. This is done using the same dual strategy mentioned above. The results indicate that the perceptions of the quality of life among these employees is not very positive. Immediate, job-related aspects, such as relations with coworkers, and the amount of comfort associated with jobs, are perceived favorably. The more distant areas of work, promotions and financial rewards, receive less desirable ratings. Similarly, the commitment of the employees was only slightly above the neutral point. Neither satisfaction nor commitment reveal positive perceptions of the quality of work life experienced. This holds true for sample wide as well as occupational groups. Examination of the standard organizational commitment model fails to provide empirical support for it. Suggestions are made for improving the measurement of commitment. Additionally, future areas of research are identified for the study of the quality of work life.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is expansive. In addition to creating massive infrastructure projects across the globe, the BRI creates new foreign policy dynamics between countries and new attitudes about public goods provision (PGP) and the role of the state within host countries. The BRI is unique because of the nature of the goods being provided and the identity of the provider. Power dynamics between countries involved in this type of sovereign- sovereign PGP are quite different than that of colonizer-colonized, IGO-sovereign, and NGO- sovereign PGP. An original survey experiment tested which aspect of sovereign-sovereign PGP had the largest effect on public opinion toward BRI host governments in Estonia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan. On average, I find that citizens in these three states do not prefer China as an infrastructure funder. I also find that public opinion toward host governments is conditional on exposure to the Belt and Road Initiative. Publics with limited exposure are opposed to the notion of sovereign-sovereign PGP in the abstract, but approve of the concept when asked how it would affect feelings toward their own government. However, when publics have greater exposure to the BRI, the reverse is true. Publics are accepting of sovereign-sovereign PGP in the abstract, but disapprove of their own government for participating in the BRI. Concerns about Chinese pressure to change a country’s foreign policy elicit the strongest responses from those surveyed, followed by physical security concerns, and concerns about the BRI’s effects on domestic policy making. These findings highlight the Belt and Road Initiative’s impact on international relations and its effects on public opinion toward host country governments. / Political Science

One of the major problems encountered in assessment of interactions between states over a period of time embodying major changes in foreign policy relations is the lack of comparative analysis. Relatively little attention has been focused on the development of a comprehensive relational concept which would permit longitudinal and comparative analysis of nonroutinized foreign policy relations. The emphasis of most studies has been on investigating a few specific major events from a variety of alternative approaches often relying on a single indicator for explanation of behavioral occurrences. This study seeks to go beyond these concerns by developing a more comprehensive relational concept from which to make comparative evaluations of alternative explanations to major changes in foreign policy relations. Major changes in foreign policy relations are identified between subsystem members and hegemons in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Asia for the period 1954 to 1970. In order to ascertain the occurrence and direction of major changes in relations, the concept of distance has been operationalized on the basis of five behavioral indicators. These indicators include measures of trade,diplomatic contacts, United Nations voting behavior, conflict event/interactions, and cooperative event/interactions. Eleven cases of major change both toward and away from the hegemon in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and Asia have been selected from the traditional foreign policy literature for validation of the measurements of distance change. The distance change measurements utilized in this research are able to identify the occurrence, direction and intensity of the major foreign policy changes between subsystem members and their hegemons as described in the traditional literature. An analysis of procedural requirements for distance change identifies 181 cases of major or dramatic changes across the three subsystems for the 1954 to 1970 time period. Two systems level relationships have also been tested to ascertain the impact of differing conditions in the international system on the direction and occurrence of distance change. Because of the absence of parametric data, Kendall's tau correlation coefficient has been selected to measure the relationship between distance change and systemic conditions. Consistently low correlations are indicated for the thesis that the level of conflict in the international system influences the direction of distance changes during the period 1954- to 1970. Little correlational relationship is also found between distance change and the level of Sino-Soviet conflict in the Eastern European and Asian subsystems for the 1963 to 1970 time period. The second set of systemic relationships tested concerns the effect of the level of conflict in differing "states" of the system (i.e., the bipolar and the multipolar periods) on distance change. The correlational analysis utilizing these time periods finds little support for the hypothesized relationship between distance change and level of systemic conflict in the Eastern European and Western European subsystems during the bipolar period from 1954 to 1962. The strongest correlational relationships between distance change and level of system conflict are indicated for the Soviet Union and the United States in the multipolar period (i.e., 1963 to 1970). Difference in the occurrence and direction of distance change relationships between subsystems and hegemons suggests that an intervening variable, degree of hegemonic control, may influence the likelihood and direction of major foreign policy changes by subsystem members. A comparative analysis of a series of middle range theories which take into consideration subsystem structural relations with the hegemon and variations in time periods may reveal more satisfactory explanations of change in foreign policy distance.