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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
American Humanitarian Intervention: How National Interests, Domestic And International Factors, And 'Historical Milieu' Shape U.S. Intervention Policy, Grant Stegner
Political Science Honors Projects
This paper examines why the US intervenes militarily in some humanitarian crises, but not in others. While US national interests at stake in humanitarian intervention scenarios initially guide policy formation, causal factors such as domestic and international influences, and 'historical milieu' create an 'operational environment' in which national interests and intervention policy evolve. These causal factors are then applied to the 1999 US-led NATO intervention in Kosovo, and the US' current non-intervention in Darfur. US humanitarian interventions and non-interventions form a broader, non-linear trajectory of engagements in which past precedents and experiences continually reshape subsequent intervention policy. The critical denominator …
Ideology Meets The Real World: How State Collapse Affects Islamist Movements, Zachary Devlin-Foltz
Ideology Meets The Real World: How State Collapse Affects Islamist Movements, Zachary Devlin-Foltz
Political Science Honors Projects
When states collapse, so do the most obvious obstacles to violent extremism in their territory. Extremists seem free to recruit and operate from these areas without interference from state security forces. In reality, however, state collapse creates as many constraints as opportunities for extremists. This paper uses theories of sub-state conflict and theories of Islamism to compare Islamist groups in Somalia, Iraq, and Egypt. Groups in collapsed states face a conflict between local political power and extremist ideology; pursuing one often threatens the other. Understanding which one each group will prioritize becomes the key policy imperative for counter-terrorist operations.