The Politics and the Administration of Humanitarian Interventions
Lecturer: Julian Junk
This seminar will touch upon the following subfields of political science:
- International Relations, International Organizations and Foreign Policy Analysis
- Theories of Public Administration and Organizations
- Theories of Agenda-Setting and Policy Cycles
- Media Analysis
- Qualitative Research Methods
The seminar will give an overview of these theoretical clusters and aims at applying them to the challenges of humanitarian intervention (see below). In addition, the lecturer will give introductions to some qualitative research methods, namely case study designs (co-variational and causal process tracing) as well as content and discourse analysis Students are expected to present and discuss the literature and to transform the theoretical literature into research designs. These research designs should be extended into full-fledged research papers.
Beyond these theoretical and methodological goals, the course creates the opportunity for discussion and interaction with two guest speakers (one United Nations diplomat and one German diplomat) if the proposal for an „Innovatives Lehrprojekt“ will be positively reviewed.
After the failure the international community and the international bureaucracies to prevent genocides and massacres in Rwanda and Srebrenica, the Responsibility to Protect was codified into international law at the UN international summit in 2005 referring to the responsibility of both every state to protect its citizens and of the responsibility of the international community to intervene when states are unwilling or unable to do so. In practice, however, international humanitarian interventions remain both rarely decided upon and controversial. Besides being both theoretically (see dominant interest-based approaches) and empirically (blockades in the UN Security Council, for instance) highly unlikely phenomena, international interventions based on humanitarian reasoning do happen (in form of large scale peace operations, for instance) even if they are prone to failure. This seminar sheds light on the whole policy process of humanitarian interventions: from media dynamics and agenda-setting on the domestic level to international negotiations and finally planning and implementing interventions within international bureaucracies. The seminar does not engage deeply into a normative debate on the moral and legal conditions for humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty, but rather elaborates on the pathologies and complexity of international agenda-setting, decision-making and planning. It will address questions like: which role does media play in shaping governments’ decisions to act (or to act not) facing humanitarian atrocities, how do states behave in international negotiations on international interventions, how is the planning for and implementation of peace operations affected by these political processes, and what are systemic administrative pathologies within international buraucracies in planning and implementing peace operations through international administrations. Throughout the seminar, we will discuss and develop a theoretical framework for explaining humanitarian interventions as an information-driven process in which multiple levels are involved and in which policy entrepreneurship might be necessary to overcome the many structural bottlenecks. In addition, we take international organizations seriously as bureaucracies and actors – and not only as mere fora of international decision-making.
Literature:
| Barnett, Michael N. and Martha Finnemore (2004): Rules for the World, International Organizations in Global Politics. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, ch. 1, ch. 2 and ch. 5. |
| Davies, Michael D. V. (2002): The administration of international organizations top down and bottom up. Ashgate, Aldershot. |
| Diehl, Paul F. (2008): Peace Operations. Polity Press, New York. |
| Doyle, Michael W. and Nicholas Sambanis (2006): Making War and Building Peace. Princeton University Press, Princeton, ch. 1 and ch. 2. |
| Holzgrefe, J. L. and Robert O. Keohane (Eds.) (2003): Humanitarian Intervention. Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. |
| Jones, Bryan D. and Frank R. Baumgartner (2005): The Politics of Attention - How Governments Prioritizes Problems. Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp. 1-85. |
| Putnam, Robert (1988): Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: the Logic of Two-Level Games, in: International Organization, 42, pp. 427-460. |
| Robinson, Piers (2002): The CNN Effect: the Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. Routledge, London. |
Most of the literature will be available electronically.
Performance records: Presentation, Research Design, Research Paper, Discussant Role
