Browsing by Subject "Foreign Policy"

“Caring for Korea” examines American relief work during and following the Korean War (1950-1953), and the way that humanitarianism shaped American Cold War approaches to empire. Centering aid workers, I highlight the lives and experiences of Americans who expressed concern for Koreans and mobilized that concern to build influence in East Asia. Utilizing records from government agencies, the United Nations, and church and relief organizations, I find incomplete American hegemony, even as the U.S. controlled and utilized many different institutions to exert its will in Korea. My research shows how through humanitarian work, the labor of empire was gendered, soft, and flexible; and that the agents of empire used American influence to work for their own goals.

Scholars and practitioners recognize the importance of coordination in mitigating the costs of aid proliferation and improving the effectiveness of foreign aid. However, low levels of donor coordination persist. In this dissertation, I address this donor coordination puzzle. I offer a novel theory of coordination called Constrained Coordination, in which I posit that two key factors that play a crucial role in shaping coordination. First, I argue that donors strategic interests are a damper on coordination – the greater the strategic political, economic, and security interests of a donor government in a recipient country, the less coordination its aid agency will engage in. Second, I argue that aid agency autonomy is positively associated with coordination – the greater the level of autonomy – or freedom – that an aid agency has from its home government, the more that aid agency will coordinate. In order to test my Constrained Coordination theory, the dissertation uses mix-methods, and includes a quantitative analysis of hundreds of donor agencies coordination. I also leverage over one hundred extensive interviews with key stakeholders to present two qualitative case studies of donor coordination in Nigeria and Zambia. Finally, I use qualitative evidence to look at the coordination of South-South donors, a group of donors growing in importance. I find that a donor government’s strategic interests have a significant impact on whether its aid agency will coordinate within recipient countries. Similarly, when a recipient is strategic to a large number of countries, donors will not be well coordinated. Second, I find that aid agencies with greater levels of autonomy from their home governments coordinate more. And finally, I find that these effects amplify one another – a high autonomy donor working in a low priority country coordinates more than any other combination of strategic interests and autonomy.

The main research question of this thesis is how do grand strategies form. Grand strategy is defined as a state's coherent and consistent pattern of behavior over a long period of time in search of an overarching goal. The political science literature usually explains the formation of grand strategies by using a planning (or design) model. In this dissertation, I use primary sources, interviews with former government officials, and historical scholarship to show that the formation of grand strategy is better understood using a model of emergent learning imported from the business world. My two case studies examine the formation of American grand strategy during the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras. The dissertation concludes that in both these strategic eras the dominating grand strategies were formed primarily by emergent learning rather than flowing from advanced designs.

Turkish-Western relations have undergone a tremendous transformation over the last five years. This relationship has at times produced vast amounts of cooperation, while at other times, tension and non-cooperation has occurred. Recently, as Turkey has risen economically, politically, and militarily, there has been much concern that the "model of democracy" in the Middle East" is moving towards political Islam, which has created speculation that Turkey is leaving behind its "Western" allies to pursue a foreign policy of "neo-Ottomanism". To achieve an understanding for the conditions where cooperation should occur in Turkish-Western relations, this paper will first correct the term "neo-Ottomanism" in the literature on Turkish foreign policy by updating it with the "new" audience costs of "neo-Ottomanism" and upgrading it to "neo-Ottomanism 2.0". A decision-model will be created using a comparative historical analysis that designates the new audience costs associated with "neo-Ottomanism 2.0" by reimaging contemporary Turkish politics and constructing a theory around how audience costs at the domestic level of politics incurs costs on the current Turkish government that makes cooperation at times less likely given the intensity of an issue. By doing such, this paper will demonstrate when cooperation should occur between the West and Turkey and when the audience costs associated with "neo-Ottomanism 2.0" are not high enough that they will weaken the government's hold on power