Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Foreign Military Interventions in Civil Conflicts, 1946-2002(2014) Eralp Wolak, Pelin; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Empirical evidence shows that foreign military interventions in civil conflicts on the side of the government or opposition are frequent and they have significant political and economic impacts on both the intervening states and the target states. While many recent quantitative studies have examined the impact of foreign military interventions on the dynamics and outcomes of civil conflicts, similar attention has not been paid to the factors that motivate foreign powers to intervene in intrastate disputes. Most of the theoretical insight on the causes of military intervention comes from earlier qualitative studies that analyze the foreign policy decision making of interveners in detail. In contrast, the small amount of quantitative research conducted on this topic focuses more on the attributes of the civil conflict that attract foreign military intervention. The purpose of this study is to analyze the causes of military interventions from a foreign policy decision making perspective which has been neglected in current quantitative studies. In order to identify the factors that motivate state leaders to use military intervention as a foreign policy instrument, this dissertation examines the international and domestic sources of foreign policy decision making through a modified realist framework. Hypotheses are tested against a novel dataset that includes both actual and potential interveners in all civil conflicts between 1946 and 2002. Sub-sample analyses are also conducted for major powers, democracies and autocracies to understand the relative importance of international, domestic and contextual factors on the intervention decisions of different types of states. The empirical findings show that the strategic significance of the conflict state, interventions by rivals or allies, and domestic considerations of leaders play a more critical role than the attributes of the civil conflict when foreign powers are deciding whether and on whose side to intervene in a civil conflict. While these empirical findings provide an improved understanding of the rationale behind foreign military interventions in civil conflicts, this dissertation also contributes theoretically to the current literature by bringing back the much needed foreign policy decision making perspective into the study of interventions.Item The Effect of Economic Condition on Civil Unrest: New Insights from Agent Based Modeling(2013) Harry, Charles Thomas; Steinbruner, John; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On the morning of December 17th 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi took a can of gasoline and lit himself on fire in front of the local governor's office in protest of having his cart and its inventory confiscated by a corrupt police force. What began as act of individual protest against the Tunisian state evolved into mass demonstrations across the Arab world significantly altering the political landscape. While researchers have explored links between economic determinants and the outbreak of civil conflict, use of large datasets and econometric analysis alone has been unable to draw the indelible connections scholars had hoped. The use of country wide data are seen as insufficient in capturing localized dynamics of civil violence calling into question the applicability of current conceptual frameworks. Case study and data collection at sufficient granularity are now necessary steps in the further exploration of this topic. To help develop our understanding of how localized conflict emerges this dissertation steps away from the use of traditional case study and econometric analysis to develop two agent based models of protest that allow exploration to changes in the average level of utility, its distribution, and growth on the onset, size, and frequency of protest. This dissertation finds that the level and distribution of utility affects the onset, evolution, magnitude, and frequency of civil instability. Further, empirical methods explored to date fail to account for significant micro dynamic behavior that influences the emergence of mass protest. This paper extends earlier modeling work on civil protest and discusses findings on how utility levels in a system of agents affect the magnitude, frequency, onset, and structure of civil conflict. The most surprising finding in this paper is the bifurcated relationship between utility distribution and the emergence of civil conflict. This specific result provides a plausible explanation for why empirical analysis has thus far been unable to correlate income inequality and civil violence.