The purpose of this dissertation is to show a yet undiscovered link between identity claims and the survival of political leaders. Diversionary theory posits that starting foreign conflicts during domestic hardship may increase the popular approval ratings of the leader and maintain him in power. I suggest that leaders may resort to initiating identity claims as a diversionary action to stay in power. Indeed, using survival analysis, this study finds a connection between the desire of leaders to protect their ethnic kin in neighboring countries and the leaders' own popularity and survival at home. Yet, identity claim initiation and escalation significantly decrease the chances of leaders to remain in office. At first sight, this is in sharp contrast with the diversionary theory literature, which suggests that leaders may employ foreign wars as a means to distract from domestic problems and increase their survival in office. Yet, the realization that the escalation of conflict may backfire does not necessarily deter leaders from diverting. Therefore, this analysis offers a new perspective in the field of rationalist explanations for war.

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Civil wars have become more prevalent in modern times and present unique challenges to conflict resolution. Third parties often intervene in civil wars attempting to insure that peace is imposed and will persist. However, the impact of third parties on intrastate conflicts remains incomplete. The civil conflict literature does not sufficiently distinguish how third parties promote peaceful outcomes during a peacekeeping operation and why a state remains stable after the peacekeepers leave. By examining data on third party interventions from 1946-2006 and individually examining the case of Sierra Leone, this research concludes that peacekeeping missions promoting transparency, credible information sharing, and strong signals of commitment present the best possibilities for peace during and after the mission. Analysis from empirical tests and case study support that peacekeeping missions are most effective when they allow for credible and reliable communication between domestic adversaries. Ultimately, third parties must promote a political solution between rebel and government factions in civil wars so that peaceful methods of dispute resolution are promoted in the absence of a third party preventing the recurrence of war.

In this dissertation I develop a theory that seeks to account for the variation in order present across regions. I propose that the observed variation in regional order in the international system is rooted in the domestic politics of region members. Unlike other attempts at explaining regional order, I account for domestic politics in the political capacity of member states. Measured as the relative ability of states to extract resources from their domestic societies, political capacity provides a measure of institutional and cultural constraints upon the ability of states to engage in costly foreign policies, such as conflict. The more extensive these constraints, the more likely a state will engage in cooperative behavior, resulting in more extensive regional institutions or trade interdependence. I show that regions comprised of high capacity democracies, like Europe, are highly cooperative, while those comprised of high capacity autocracies, like the Middle East, are more conflictual. The more cooperative the region, the greater the degree of interdependence and institutional architecture that will emerge. Finally, because the presence of regional order is contingent upon the domestic characteristics of constituent states, I develop a novel means of identifying regions for the proper measurement and identification of regional variables of interest. Using an opportunity and willingness framework, I define regions as stable geographic spaces of interacting states behaving uniquely from the broader international system. The resulting empirical analysis is a new dataset that provides not only a necessary means of case selection for the regional level variables included in this dissertation, but a specification of regions broadly applicable to regionalist research.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the link between internal and external conflict of states in the field of International Relations. More specifically, it is a critique of the Diversionary War theory, which argues that political leaders can instigate foreign conflict to divert the attention from domestic issues in order to secure their political positions. This paper will test an alternative approach to the Diversionary War theory called the Diversionary Peace theory, which inverts the logic of the original theory. It argues that leaders facing domestic strife have incentives to cooperate with other states in order to deal with the internal problems in a more cost effective way. Using process tracing methodology, the Diversionary Peace theory is applied to Turkey from 1984-1999, to understand how the Kurdish issue as a source of domestic conflict in Turkey affected the Turkish-Syrian relations. The Diversionary Peace Theory would assume that as the Kurdish conflict escalates at the domestic level, Turkey would be inclined to give concessions to Syria to deescalate conflict at the international level. This paper proves otherwise: as the domestic conflict escalates, relations actually deteriorate and cooperation becomes less likely. Therefore, it is both a critique of the Diversionary War theory and the Diversionary Peace theory. The main interpretation of the findings is that the theory is not applicable to those cases where the boundaries between domestic and international realms are too porous as in the case of the Kurdish politics. When the domestic conflict and international dispute is interlinked, as in this case, I argue that cooperation might not be possible. Future reseachers in the area are advised to pay attention to whether the domestic factor and the international factor are interlinked, how the level of domestic conflict affects foreign relations and the impact of domestic audience costs.

This research explores developments within the United Nations that have led to the creation of the Forward Intervention Brigade (FIB). It will consider the political, legal, economic, and ethical issues surrounding armed defensive-intervention during humanitarian crises. Topics explored include the effectiveness of armed intervention during crises and ethics concerning the use of arms when intervening for humanitarian or peacemaking purposes. How success and failure is being defined and the current status of the mission will be discussed. The question of the possible costs of non-intervention is raised. This case example is linked to the failure of the UN to effectively respond to the genocide that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 and the subsequent cost of that failure. The development of powers within the UN is considered in terms of the creation of this armed force, as are the ways this may impact the interpretation of international law regarding armed intervention.

Hierarchical or asymmetrical power relationships among states have long been a focus of scholarly attention (e.g., asymmetrical alliances, trade dependencies). While the "power to hurt" is one expression of power, an alternative approach is to gain and exercise authority, or "rightful rule." One of the major impediments to the study of social concepts such as authority or legitimacy, however, is in their informal or intangible nature. This dissertation uses game theoretic and latent variable approaches to capture informal, social authority relationships, or social hierarchies, among international states and explores the effects of these hierarchies on security and economic behavior. I posit that states adopt one of two social roles--that of a dominant or a subordinate. Each subordinate chooses a degree of autonomy that it is willing to cede to the dominant in exchange for a corresponding degree of protection. Ranging from complete autonomy to complete control, these dyadic bargains make up a social international hierarchy. This hierarchy affects the relationships between each subordinate and the dominant, as well as the relationships among subordinates. In the security realm, the probability of conflict initiation is inversely related to the degree of subordination. When conflict does occur, dominants are more likely to intervene when the target is located at a higher position in the dominant's social hierarchy than the aggressor state. Economically, the probability that a state enacts illiberal policies is inversely related to its degree of subordination. Moreover, more subordinated states face a lower risk of economic sanction than states located lower in the hierarchy, even for similar illiberal actions. Empirical analysis of states within the US hierarchy (1950-2000) and UK hierarchy (1870-1913) using strategic probit models supports these theoretical predictions.

This dissertation explores the interactive effects of domestic audience costs and strategic interests on state behavior in international crises. I argue that the magnitude of a leader’s audience costs is influenced by the level of strategic interests, which leads to several predictions of crisis behavior in terms of (1) decisions to issue threats, including bluffs, (2) the credibility of these threats and the willingness of opponents to resist, and (3) crisis outcomes, including war. In the theoretical chapters, a formal model of crisis bargaining is stylized under conditions of complete and incomplete information. Based on this model, several novel predictions are derived regarding crisis behavior. These predictions are quantitatively tested through a series of monadic and dyadic probit and multinomial logit models using a dataset of deterrence crises for the period 1895-1985. The results lend strong validity to the approach advanced here that does not consider endogenous and exogenous factors in isolation, but rather models their interplay to predict the dynamics of crisis behavior. With respect to dispute initiation, the results show that strategic interests have a much stronger influence on authoritarian leaders’ willingness to initiate disputes than they do for democracies. Moreover, the formal stylization and empirical analyses show that democracies can and do bluff, which is in contrast to the conventional expectations from audience cost research. Relatedly, this study specifies if and when democratic threats are credible and how the interplay between variable domestic costs and strategic interests can lead to deterrence success, failure, or war. While there is little difference between the credibility of democratic and authoritarian threats at the lower level of interests, democratic threats become more credible and less likely to be resisted as the interests at stake increase. As for crisis outcomes, among others, war is more likely between opponents with vital interests involved; yet even here, the predictions are not straightforward but rather the probability of war is increasing at a differential rate for democratic and authoritarian initiators. Whereas the formal models in this study provide the logical rationale for these and other expectations, the quantitative findings demonstrate their empirical validity as well.

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本研究探討的是楊淑君被取消資格事件，發生在2010年11月17日。基於框架理論背景，研究的目的是探索新聞平面媒體如何使用框架來報導楊淑君事件。具體來說，本研究旨在探討不同國家的新聞報導框架差異。 本研究使用自2010年11月18日起至12月17日止的相關事件新聞報導作為樣本，進行台灣與韓國的報導框架比較。台灣蘋果日報和自由時報有150則相關新聞文章，而韓國的相關新聞文章只有28篇。 本研究發現，台灣媒體所使用的主要框架為責任框架，而韓國媒體所使用的框架為情感框架。台灣的主要新聞消息來源為台灣政府，而韓國新聞消息來源主要來自於台灣媒體。 / This research studies the framing and its application to the Yang Shu-chun disqualification incident, which happened in November 17, 2010. Based on the theoretical background of Framing, this study aims at exploring how the news print media framed one of the recent controversies between Taiwan and Korea, Yang Shu-chun disqualification. Specifically, this tried to see how different each country’s news coverage framed it and how different they used news sources. A comparative case study is conducted with the news stories regarding the incident from November 18, 2010 to December 17, 2010 in Taiwan and Korea. Because of the large difference of the number of the articles between Taiwan and Korea, only two Taiwanese newspapers, the Taiwan Apple Daily and the Liberty Times, are selected among many papers, while Korean news articles are chosen all. They are 150 stories and 28 stories respectively. This research finds that Taiwan media used the responsibility frame most while Korean one did the human interest frame. Both have the majority of episodic frames. As of the news sources, Taiwan’s papers used the news source from Taiwanese government, while Korean ones mostly used Taiwan’s media source. Taiwan used diverse sources from Taiwan side but Korea heavily depended on foreign sources. News coverage with the source of politicians has a tendency of having political consequences framing.