Browsing by Subject "International relations"

Over the past decade, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have become increasingly active in authoritarian regimes as they respond to emergencies, assist with development, or advocate for human rights. Though these services and advocacy can challenge the legitimacy and power of the regime, many autocratic states permit INGO activities, and INGOs continue to work in these countries despite heavy restrictions on their activities. In this dissertation, I theorize that the relationship between INGOs and autocrats creates a state of amicable contempt, where each party is aware that the other both threatens and supports their existence. After outlining the theory, I explore the factors that determine when autocracies will constrict the legal environment for INGOs through de jure anti-NGO laws and the discretionary implementation of those laws. I combine a set of statistical models run on a cross-sectional dataset of 100 autocracies between 1991–2014 with case studies of Egypt, Russia, and China to test the effect of internal risk, external threats, and reputational concerns on the de facto civil society regulatory environment. I find that autocracies constrict civil society regulations in response to domestic instability and as regimes become more stable and cohesive. I also find that autocracies constrict civil society regulations in response to external threats to the regime, including the pressures of globalization. I find no evidence of an effect from reputational concerns. I then use results from a global survey of 641 INGOs to test the determinants of international NGO behavior. I find that the conflict between principles and instrumental concerns shapes INGO behavior and influences its relationship to its host government. Finally, I combine the survey results with case studies of four INGOs—Article 19, AMERA International, Index on Censorship, and the International Republican Institute—to analyze how INGOs respond to two forms of government regulation. When facing gatekeeping restrictions designed limit access to the country, I find that INGOs rely on their programmatic flexibility to creatively work around those restrictions. When facing restrictions aimed at capturing INGO programs, organizations rely on their programmatic flexibility to protect against changes to their core principles and mission.

Credibility has long been a subject of interest in international relations. However, recent works minimize some of the earliest and most intriguing credibility questions. To what degree is accuracy related to credibility, do private signals exist solely in the shadow of their public counterparts or do they have credibility of their own? Moreover, how do leaders weigh concurrent public and private signals during a crisis? In this thesis, I examine the nature of public and private signals in the Cuban Missile Crisis in an inductive, qualitative manner. I find that in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite some rationalist assertions, private signals are at times meaningful. Moreover, the divergences between public and private signals are limited. As such, the two exist in an interactional, almost double-helical state. This finding has distinct importance for the future of credibility scholarship.

Event data provide high-resolution and high-volume information about political events. From COPDAB to KEDS, GDELT, ICEWS, and PHOENIX, event datasets and the frameworks that produce them have supported a variety of research efforts across fields and including political science. While these datasets are machine-coded from vast amounts of raw text input, they nonetheless require substantial human effort to produce and update sets of required dictionaries. I introduce a novel method for generating large dictionaries appropriate for event-coding given only a small sample dictionary. This technique leverages recent advances in natural language processing and deep learning to greatly reduce the researcher-hours required to go from defining a new domain-of-interest to producing structured event data that describes that domain. An application to cybersecurity is described and both the generated dictionaries and resultant event data are examined. The cybersecurity event data are also examined in relation to existing datasets in related domains.

When do recruitment windfalls strengthen organizations while threatening their leader’s perception of success? This paper introduces a theory of grassroots-driven organizational change that is broadly applicable when leaders balance short-term survival with long-term mission focus.

I introduce the concept of the \say{personnel resource curse} in which recruitment windfalls simultaneously strengthen an organization while undermining the leader’s ability to achieve their goals. I argue that upward- driving internal pressures caused by incomplete socialization of grassroots members can transform the priorities and operational focus of resource-constrained organizations. When this happens, leaders experience pressure to reorient their organization towards the preferences of the base, even if these preferences are not the same as the leader’s vision. The process and outcome are surprising, as the theory identifies contexts in which even strategic leaders will recruit cohorts that exceed their socializing capacity and who will subsequently initiate this change process. An undertheorized avenue of organizational change, grassroots-driven, and bottom-up transformational pressures can constrain group operations, produce internal stressors, and influence the trajectory of political and social movements.

The dissertation uses a multimethod approach to build a general theory of organizational transformation. I introduce the theory and frame the dissertation using case studies and a simple formal model of leader-recruit negotiation. The heart of this theory is a negotiation-centric view of organizations, in which leaders require at least some degree of consent from the rank-and-file to adopt specific actions. This approach leads to a model of organizational decision making that is sensitive to changes in leverage and introduces avenues through which leaders can be induced to accommodate the preferences of members whose presence is critical to the organization’s effectiveness. The model of organizational transformation developed in this dissertation is applicable in a wide range of contexts, from militant groups struggling to operate and expand, to issue-based organizations that seek an influx of resources and skills, to decentralized political organizations that lack strong mechanisms of control and socialization. To demonstrate generality, this dissertation presents the results of a survey of United States-based non-profit leaders and managers, finding that experience with these dynamics is prevalent in the sample.

Understanding the impact of grassroots-driven and bottom-up transformational pressures on the evolution of organizations has a wide array of implications, from philosophical questions about how organizations maintain their identity and priorities to tactical conclusions about how to best nurture or combat organizations undergoing internal transformations. The research makes theoretical and empirical contributions to social scientific theories about organizational dynamics and the evolution of organizations.

In a democratic society, does the electorate approve of truth and disapprove of deception, do opinion patterns exclusively mimic partisan elite views, or do opinion patterns react exclusively to successful or failed outcomes? Do citizens hold leaders accountable for the perceived truthfulness of foreign policy claims or do they only evaluate whether or not the policies were successful? The existing literature on public opinion and foreign policy calls the accountability role for the public "audience costs," and specifies that concerns about audience costs constrain leaders. However, the literature is not clear on what role normative issues may play in generating audience costs. This gap in the literature is notable because so much of the debate surrounding significant policy issues, especially war-making and military action, is couched in retrospective, normative, moralizing language. These debates make no sense if the pragmatic, forward-looking dimensions of audience costs - reliability and success - are all that exist. Through a survey experiment and four historical case studies developed with primary and secondary historical sources, news articles, and polling data, I find that there is a complex dynamic at work between the public's desire for successful outcomes and the high value placed upon truth-telling and transparency within a democracy. Studying justifications for military action and war, I find that the public will be motivated to punish leaders perceived as deceptive, but that imposition of audience costs will be moderated by factors including partisanship, degree of elite unity, and the leader's damage control strategy in response to disapproval.

What is the utility and relative efficacy of positive inducements and sanctions in international politics? Are inducements and sanctions actually different or just the two sides of the same coin? How have inducements and sanctions been used and how effective have they been? My dissertation examines the effect of carrot and stick-like foreign policies in international relations. Dominant works on risk-taking and decision-making—like loss aversion – have shown that people are more sensitive to potential losses than gains, which would suggest that sanctions should be utilized more in order to achieve preferred outcomes. I find, however, that inducement policies that require concessions from the target state can be framed to gain the target state’s public support and allow target state leaders to “save face.” In contrast, I find that sanctions provoke nationalism, creating a rally around the flag effect, resulting in negative consequences for the sender state. Using a presence-absence framework of positive and negative outcomes, utilizing experimental methods to study the micro-foundations of inducement and sanction perceptions, as well as a case study of the Six-Party Talks based on field work consisting of archival work and interviews, my dissertation aims to bridge the policy-academy gap by translating a perennial policy-level problem of “carrots vs. sticks” to an academic question assessing the utility and relative efficacy of positive inducements versus sanctions.

Since their creation, the multilateral development banks have accumulated performance records that include both substantial successes and stunning failures. Nowhere have their performance records been more mixed and controversial than with respect to environmental management issues. The multilateral development banks have financed projects that are widely considered to be environmental disasters, but have also financed projects that successfully included best practice environmental mitigation measures. They have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars financing unsuccessful environmental protection programs, while at the same time they have supported programs that contributed to the rapid development of environmental management capacity in less-developed countries. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore when and why monitoring and evaluation can prompt the multilateral development banks to move away from poor performing projects and towards high performing projects.

This type of performance-based allocation has been repeatedly highlighted as a key element in the successful delivery of development assistance. To test when the multilateral development banks practice performance-based allocation, I assembled a team that coded environmental performance information from 960 project evaluations, 174 program evaluations, and 74 civil society complaints. I use the resulting data to model when four multilateral development banks - the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and African Development Bank - make performance-based allocation decisions about environmentally-risky and environment-improving operations. In addition, I visited the headquarters of each of these organizations and conducted interviews with 54 staff members about the processes that are in place to use monitoring and evaluation information as part of decision-making.

I find that the establishment of monitoring and evaluation systems at the MDBs has not created incentives for staff to practice performance-based allocation. Instead, performance information influences allocation decisions when it helps MDB staff approve future projects more quickly. It does so by helping staff identify development projects that are likely to face significant delays due to the inability of the borrowing country to manage negative environmental impacts and to identify the borrowing countries that are likely to successfully implement environment-improving operations.

Recent decades have witnessed increasing levels of internet censorship as part of the global diffusion of digital authoritarianism, yet the causes and patterns of the diffusion remain uncertain. This article argues that the international environment constitutes a vital factor related to the cross-national diffusion of censorship through influencing the norm and expertise to censor. I develop and test three hypotheses to examine the two proposed paths: (1) states employ higher levels of censorship in response to the increased norm to censor within their “neighborhood”; (2) states receive more technological expertise on censorship from their “neighbors”, which leads to (3) the availability of censorship expertise increases states’ employment of censorship. Using social network analysis, I construct three types of international neighborhood based on linkages of geography, trade, and military alliance. Using panel data on the internet censorship level of 96 countries over a period of eleven years (2009-2020), I test the hypotheses on all three types of neighborhoods through fixed-effects regression with spatially weighted techniques. The analysis shows that the military alliance neighborhood has the most salient impact on the diffusion of censorship through both norm and technological availability, while the trade neighborhood also shows homogeneity in the perceived norm to censor. I interpret the result as evidence that censorship is encouraged among authoritarian alliance states by those already possessing sophisticated censorship systems like China. The study contributes to the growing literature on democratic backsliding by introducing the international dimension into digital authoritarianism.

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.

My dissertation, Critical Realism: An Ethical Approach to Global Politics, investigates two strands of modern political realism and their divergent ethics, politics, and modes of inquiry: the mid- to late 20th century realism of Hans Morgenthau and E.H. Carr and the scientific realism of contemporary International Relations scholarship. Beginning with the latter, I engage in (1) immanent analysis to show how scientific realism fails to meet its own explanatory protocol and (2) genealogy to recover the normative origins of the conceptual and analytical components of scientific realism. Against the backdrop of scientific realism's empirical and normative shortcomings, I turn to Morgenthau and Carr to appraise what I term their critical realism. I map out the constellation of their political thought by reconstructing the interrelations between (1) the historical crises motivating their writings, (2) their philosophical and methodological criticisms and commitments, (3) their political prescriptions and ethics. My dissertation demonstrates how reading realist texts through the lens of contemporary methodological conventions decisively shapes our theoretical purview, empirical knowledge, and political judgments. Beyond illuminating the underappreciated radical, critical, and historical dimensions of political realism, my dissertation has implications for contemporary debates on international ethics and foreign policy as well as research in political science and political theory.

Counterterrorism, much like terrorism itself, is often a "battle of ideas." Yet, in the fight against al-Qaeda, the U.S. is currently losing this battle. This paper argues that the implementation of a counter-narrative strategy is crucial to the overall fight against al-Qaeda. It begins by discussing the importance of narratives, both to human cognition and international relations in general. It then explores al-Qaeda's narrative and the reasons for its success. After detailing the U.S.'s failure to develop its own counter-narrative against al-Qaeda, it ends with a strategy for a potential U.S. counter-narrative moving forward.

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.

This dissertation employs game theoretic techniques to examine various topics in international relations and law. Chapter 2 uses a crisis bargaining model that accounts for prior bargaining agreements to study the conditions under which states choose to engage in multiple wars over different issues. I find that a proposing state is willing to risk war with multiple states when they are overly optimistic about the state they are currently bargaining with being weak.

Chapter 3 uses a game theory model of complete information to study the conditions under which a third-party state will intervene in a civil conflict when it must account for a potential retaliation by another external state. I find that when choosing to intervene or not, the potential intervening state must weigh the costs of military action by the retaliating state and the political ramifications of issuing an empty threat against each other.

Finally, Chapter 4 uses a game theory model of asymmetric information to analyze how a criminal defendant's ability to crowdfund legal fees can impact a prosecutor's plea bargaining decision. I find that a prosecutor will offer a relatively lenient plea deal to defendants whom they perceive to have a high ability and can make the trial costs high, or who they believe are low ability defendants while facing high political costs. On the other hand, they will offer relatively harsh plea deals to defendants whom they perceive to have a high ability and the trial cost is low, or who they believe have a low ability while facing low political costs.

This dissertation project argues that high levels of religious commitment within a population-that is, high levels of importance attached to religious identities and ideas-can increase a state's propensity for initiating conflict. Following a three-article framework, the project contains three interlocking empirical studies, each speaking to religion's role in conditioning interstate conflict and connections between domestic culture and global politics.

Article 1, "Religiosity and Bellicosity: The Impact of Religious Commitment on Patterns of Interstate Conflict," explores whether states with religiously committed citizens are more likely to initiate conflict than states with less committed populations. The article builds upon findings within the literature on American politics that link individuals' levels of religious commitment to their attitudes about foreign policy, and tests whether the implications of these findings have cross-national applicability and explanatory power for interstate conflict. Using a novel, robust measure of the proportion of a state's population that is religiously committed, as well as monadic and dyadic statistical models, the analysis finds widespread connections between religious commitment and bellicose state behaviors. The results show that states with more religiously committed populations demonstrate higher propensities for initiating conflict with other states. This relationship is most severe when both states in a dyad have high levels of religious commitment, while it does not appear to be conditioned by whether majorities within the populations of each state ascribe to different religious traditions.

Article 2, "Sacred Bonds? Leaders, Religious Constituents, and Foreign Policy in Turkey," outlines a theory to more deeply analyze the empirical phenomenon identified in the first article, explaining why countries with religiously committed populations are likely to be prone to international conflict. The article builds the theory and then tests it on a case study of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's tenure as prime minister and president of Turkey. The theory posits that in highly religious societies such as Turkey, leaders have incentives to compete for and maintain the support of their religious citizens when they perceive credible threats from domestic challengers. To effectively compete, leaders use religious signals to "outbid" their opponents and establish themselves as trustworthy champions of the faithful. As part of this process, leaders are incentivized to religiously outbid into the realm of foreign policy in pursuit of "rally-round-the-sacred-symbol" effects, and so will "spiritualize" foreign threats with religious framing. In framing foreign affairs as having implications beyond the material world, however, leaders find the domestic costs of backing down from addressing the threats particularly high and their audiences especially unforgiving of inaction. Ultimately, this increases the likelihood that leaders will follow through on combative rhetoric and results in higher overall likelihoods that they will initiate conflict. The case study leverages original field interviews and both Turkish and English-language resources to test and refine the mechanisms of the general theory.

Finally, Article 3, "Choose Your Words Faithfully: Religious Commitment, Elite Rhetoric, and the Formation of Individual Foreign Policy Opinion," takes a micro-level approach to the relationship between religious commitment and state foreign policy behaviors. The project focuses on why and how religious signals, like those identified in the macro theory of Article 2, may influence the foreign policy opinions of religiously committed people and elicit their support for a particular issue. Existing public opinion research in the United States has shown a connection between individuals' levels of religious commitment and their opinions about foreign affairs. However, relatively little is known about what drives this association, particularly when foreign policies do not have clear partisan stakeholders. The article posits that the relationship is at least partially attributable to how religiously committed people process elite cues about foreign policy issues, as they will most privilege the opinions of elites who use religious signaling. The results of an original survey experiment administered to a national sample of American adults tentatively support this argument, though the analysis suggests that not all religious signals are created equal. Religiously committed respondents show the greatest support for a foreign policy recommendation when it has been made using religious rhetoric, while a recommendation made by elites simply identified as being religious receives no more support-and often less-than one made by a non-religious group. The study contributes to our understanding of how members of the public develop foreign policy preferences in relation to their religious convictions and also helps to identify the audience for whom religious rhetoric may be an effective framing tool. The empirical evidence presented by the article contains a great deal of uncertainty, so these conclusions are ultimately preliminary, however, one final result about which there is no ambiguity-only consistent statistical significance-is that individual religious commitment matters for shaping foreign policy opinion, even in the absence of elite religious framing. Future research must therefore continue to grapple with explaining the significance of religious commitment to how individuals develop views on foreign policy.

This dissertation is a collection of studies at the intersection of global energy systems and international trade. In the first study (Chapter 2), we estimate the sensitivities of primary energy exports to disruptions through maritime chokepoints. The Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, is the conduit between the Persian Gulf region and the rest of the world. The countries in this region are rich in crude oil resources and are major energy exporters. In this study, we apply a two-stage least-squares (2SLS) approach to estimate the impacts of a soft restriction in the Strait of Hormuz to energy exports from the region on a fuel-by-fuel, country-by-country basis. The soft restriction that we evaluate here is maritime piracy, a low-grade but chronic hazard for maritime shipping. Our results suggest that maritime piracy is associated with a 7.5-vessel reduction through the Strait of Hormuz two years after the event occurred. We also find that energy exports from the Persian Gulf are generally resilient to these soft restrictions. The exceptions are refined petroleum products from smaller energy exporters, specifically Bahrain and Kuwait. We find that this is linked to different market structures for refined petroleum products and crude oil. Crude oil is demanded globally, but can only be produced in select regions. Refined petroleum products are also demanded globally, but can be produced where crude oil has been imported.

The second study (Chapter 3) introduces and applies a new hybrid-unit input-output database of energy flows in the global economy. This database, the Hybridized Option for Modeling Input-output Energy Systems (HOMIES), models the financial flows of 26 non-energy sectors and the energy flows of 13 energy types among 136 countries over 20 years (1995-2015). HOMIES is able to trace flows of primary energy (e.g. crude oil), secondary energy (e.g. electricity), and embodied energy. The latter consists of direct energy used to produce a final good and indirect energy incorporated in intermediate goods and services used to make a final product. Using HOMIES, we find that 23% of the world’s embodied energy network is comprised of trade linkages in indirect energy between primary energy producing countries and countries with which they do not have direct trade ties. We also find that the global economy is 90% more dependent on imports of indirect energy than direct energy.

The third study (Chapter 4) applies HOMIES to the global supply chains for transport equipment. This sector is unique in its complexity; it requires many kinds of manufacturing inputs from many different countries. It is also a key factor in achieving mobility security, or the ability to meet global transportation demand. The transport equipment sector relies heavily on maritime transport and, consequently, on transit through maritime chokepoints. In this study, we build an extension to HOMIES that isolates the portion of international trade that relies on thirteen key maritime chokepoints. This extension, HOMIES-CP, also differentiates between direct and indirect chokepoint dependence. The former is estimated based on bilateral transactions that require chokepoint transit. The latter compounds chokepoint dependencies as a product or service moves through the supply chain. In this study, we use HOMIES-CP to examine the mechanisms that drive chokepoint dependence in the major exporters and importers of transport equipment.

This dissertation deals with the history and memory of the Border War with China in contemporary Vietnam. Due to its particularity as a war between two neighboring socialist countries in Cold War Asia, the Border War has been a sensitive topic in Vietnam. While political sensitivity regarding the national past derives largely from the Party-State, the history and memory of the war has permeated Vietnamese society. The war's legacy can be seen in anti-China sentiments that, in the globalized neoliberal order, appear to be reviving alongside post-Cold War nationalism. The Border War against China represented an important nationalist turn for Vietnam. At the same time, the traumatic breakdown of the socialist fraternity cultivated anxiety over domestic and international relations. The recent territorial dispute over the South China Sea, between Vietnam and China, has recalled the history and memory of the war in 1979. The growing anti-China sentiment in Vietnam also interpellates the war as a near future.

As an anthropological approach to the history and memory of war, this dissertation addresses five primary questions: 1) how the historyscape of Vietnam's past has been shifted through politics on the Border War; 2) how the memoryscape involving the Border War has been configured as national and local experience; 3) how the Border War has shaped the politics of ethnic minorities in a border province; 4) why the borderscape in Vietnam constantly affects the politics of the nation-state in the globalized world order; and 5) why the border markets and trade activities have been a realm of competing instantiations of post-Cold War nationalism and global neoliberalism.

In order to tackle these questions, I conducted anthropological fieldwork in Lang Son, a northern border province and Ha Noi, the capital city of Vietnam from 2005 to 2012, and again briefly in 2014. A year of intensive fieldwork from 2008 to 2009 in Lang Son province paved the road to understanding the local history and local people's memory of the Border War in a contemporary social context. This long-term participant observation research in a sensitive border area allowed me to take a comprehensive view of how the memory of the Border War against China plays out in everyday life and affects the livelihood of the border's inhabitants. In Ha Noi, conducting archival research and discussing issues with Vietnamese scholars, I was able to broaden my understanding of Vietnamese national history and the socialist past. Because Vietnam is one of the countries with the fastest growing use of the Internet, I have also closely traced the emergence of on-line debates and the circulation of information over the Internet as a new form of social exchange in Vietnam.

As a conclusion, I suggest that memory and experience have situated Vietnam as a nation-state in a particular mode of post-Cold War nationalism, one which keeps recalling the memory of the Border War in the post-Cold War era. As the national border has been reconfigured by the legacy of war and by fluctuating border trade, the border challenges unbalanced bilateral relations in the neoliberal world order. The edge of the nation-state becomes the edge of neoliberalism in the contemporary world. The Vietnamese border region will continue to recall the horrors of nationalism and internationalism, through the imaginaries of socialist fraternity or in the practices off contemporary neoliberal multilateralism.

KEYWORDS:

Vietnam, China, Lang Son, the Border War, Memory, the Cold War, the post-Cold War, Neoliberalism.

Treated as a practical approach to deterrence, foreign alliances are believed to have a tight relationship with the onset of interstate wars. Scholars have paid substantial attention to how foreign alliances affect international security, and how domestic alliances affect domestic security. However, there could be an interaction between elements from interstate and intrastate stages, and we still lack knowledge of the mechanisms and effects. I argue in this paper that, a state can deter the rebel groups within its ally’s territory, thus decreasing the probability of civil war onset of that ally. Like nation-states, rebel groups will also assess the allies’ capability and credibility of the state they fight against to decide whether they will initiate a civil war. However, neither capability nor credibility alone can explain this dynamic. Instead, they amplify each other to prevent the onset of civil war. I find that both capability and credibility have the effect of reducing civil wars, but their effects are strong enough only when the other variable is at its higher value.

The previous literature fails to reach consensus on the role of media in the foreign aid allocation. My paper attempts to answer following questions by examining Muslim countries: Are there any media effects on the pattern of aid giving? If the media influence the amount of aid, then how does it play its role? In addition, although previous studies show that different donors have prioritized specific groups, no study systemically shows the reason why a donor prioritizes certain recipients. Examining all recipients and donors cannot control the circumstantial factors generated by different regions and ethnicities. In other words, donors allocate international aid to different group of countries for various reasons and much of the research fails to examine the reasons that cannot be generalized.

This paper conducts the OLS time series regression analysis with robust standard errors for U.S. foreign aid allocations, specifically for 46 Muslim/Arab countries. The results of my empirical analysis are threefold. First, Muslim/Arab related factors such as oil reserves, Millennium Challenge Account, and the existence of terrorist groups affect aid variation. Second, the more media attention a country acquires, the more it is likely to receive more generous allocations of aid. Finally, and most importantly, there is a negative interaction effect between the level of media coverage and the number of U.S. soldiers present in that country on aid allocation. When a Muslim recipient maintains more number of U.S. soldiers than the yearly mean U.S. troop level of Muslim countries, the media effect on aid volume decreases. This finding provides guideline for the plausible links around the public, media and governing bodies.

This dissertation explains the influence of ethnic non-state actors on the management of International Crises. I begin by arguing that when actively engaged in a crisis, ethnic actors contribute to; crisis violence, indecisive outcomes, and the escalation of interstate tensions. They do so because their more robust sponsorship allows them to drive relatively hard bargains with the state they are in conflict with. The analysis contributes to the development of theory by filling a gap in the literature and helping to resolve an important debate. Here I consider the entire population of non-state actors as a topic for analysis. This is in contrast to the general trend, which is to treat non-state actors as part of the landscape in studies that are otherwise concerned with ethnic conflict, terrorism or nation-building. In addition, the analysis here helps resolve a debate between bargaining theorist and ethnic conflict scholars concerning the relevance of ethnicity for our understanding of (both interstate and intrastate) conflict. In particular it identifies mechanisms specifically associated with ethnic rebel groups and demonstrates that ethnicity has an influence on interstate conflict through the actions of violent non-state actors. In the analysis I build on the logic above to develop a series of testable hypotheses. I then collect a new data-set of crisis-dyad-years and identify each crisis with a participating non-state actor (NSA-Crises) as well as those with ethnic non-state actors. Next I conduct a series of quantitative test of the relationship between ethnic actor participation and crisis management. The results demonstrate that ethnically mobilized rebel groups influence crises in unique ways, causing higher levels of violence and a higher incidence of stalemate. These findings are robust to various model specifications and the relationship between ethnic actors and crisis management is not conditioned by state-based sponsorship. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis for both theory and policy-making.