Dissertation
Money, Power, and Respect: Explaining the Effects of Intervention on Violence Against Civilians
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Tufts University
2021
Abstract
How do the military intervention choices of external actors shape civilian victimization in civil wars? What are the effects of different types of external intervention on civilian victimization? And how do different types of external intervention affect state and rebel decisions about violence against civilians? Existing research focused on similar questions offers competing explanations. This dissertation contributes to this debate by building and testing a novel theory of civilian victimization in civil war. My theory moves beyond the prevailing structural explanations to argue that the relationship between intervention and violence against civilians is a function of the conflict actor’s capabilities and the choices it makes in waging political violence.
I adopt a multi-method research design to test the project’s hypotheses and theoretical predictions. The descriptive statistics not only are consistent with the four hypotheses relating types of intervention with interactions of willingness and opportunity, but they also validate the disaggregation of intervention types by levels of fungibility and the use of the pattern-of-violence variables. Drawing on archival materials and semi-structured interviews, the qualitative results reach similarly suggestive conclusions.
This project makes two important contributions. First, I advance a novel reconceptualization of intervention that incorporates a wider variety of activities and actors for analytic consideration. Second, I challenge the lethality bias in the existing literature by focusing my analysis on rich, qualitative evidence to explain the effect of interest by integrating pattern-of-violence variables that address the types, amounts, and targets of violence. These conceptualizations of intervention and civilian victimization better reflect the reality of the civil war conflict environment and of the actors involved. Overall, the empirical results provide general support for my theory and illuminate important directions for future conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work in understanding civilian victimization in civil wars.
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Details
- Title
- Money, Power, and Respect: Explaining the Effects of Intervention on Violence Against Civilians
- Creators
- Meg K Guliford - Drexel University, Politics
- Contributors
- Katrina Burgess (Advisor) - Tufts University
- Awarding Institution
- Tufts University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Tufts University
- Number of pages
- 270
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Other Identifier
- 991022055639504721