Matching Items (13)
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- All Subjects: Political Science
- Creators: Wright, Thorin
Description
East Asia in the aftermath of the Cold War might provide the most favorable case for realist theory due to historical rivalries, territorial disputes, economic competition, great power politics and deep-rooted realist beliefs among politicians in the region. Yet the fundamental realist prediction of balance of power in the region has not materialized. Neither internal nor external balancing in their original senses is explicitly present. This poses a serious challenge to realism and more broadly, western international relations theories for understanding regional dynamics. Several explanations have been put forward in previous research, such as a total rejection of the applicability of realism for explaining East Asian politics, modifying realism by adding new variables, and focusing on domestic variables. Using a neoclassical realist term, underbalancing, this dissertation goes beyond neoclassical realist theory of underbalancing by reintroducing the distinction between external and internal balancing, which has direct implications for the resources needed for a balancing policy and external reactions to balancing policy. In particular, this approach emphasizes the effect of interaction between states on underbalancing. By doing so, it also highlights what is omitted by realism, namely, the agency of the targeted state at risk of being balanced. In other words, the policy of the state that is aware of its risk of being balanced could draw upon foreign policy tools it possesses to neutralize the balancing efforts from others. This notion of state policies influencing the outcome of balance of power is tested with post-Cold War East Asian politics. The cases included China-Japan and China-ASEAN strategic interactions after the Cold War. Based on materials from public media outlets, official documents and recently leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, this dissertation argues that China's policies towards neighboring states- policies expressed variously through cultural, diplomatic, economic and security initiatives- are indispensable to explain the fact of underbalancing in the region.
ContributorsChi, Zhipei (Author) / Simon, Sheldon (Thesis advisor) / Rush, James (Committee member) / Shair-Rosenfield, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Indian gaming casinos are now a common sight around Arizona. The study of the history of the Arizona Indian Gaming establishments is the topic of my thesis which focuses on the conflicts in 1992, between J. Fife Symington, governor of the State of Arizona, and the Arizona Indian tribes, particularly the Fort McDowell Yavapai Indian Community. In order to learn more about this small band of Yavapai, my thesis examines the early history of the Yavapai and some of its remarkable leaders, along with the history of Indian Tribal gaming in America and Arizona following the blockade by the Yavapai. My thesis examines how the Modern Political Economy Theory (MPET) framed Yavapai survival and identity along with their determination to achieve economic self-sufficiency. My research extended into use the legal court system the by American Indian Tribes to achieve their economic goals, that culminating in the Supreme Court ruling in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians (1987) confirming the rights of Indian tribes to conduct gaming on tribal reservation lands. Congress followed with the "Indian Gaming Regulatory Act" of 1988, (IGRA) to regulate the conduct of gaming on Indian lands, including the stipulation that states negotiate in good faith with the state's Indian tribes. Arizona Governor Symington refused to negotiate the necessary compacts between the State of Arizona and the Arizona Indian tribes. The dispute reached a climax on May 12, 1992, when Attorney General of the U.S., Linda A. Akers, ordered a raid on Arizona Indian gaming casinos and the Fort McDowell Yavapai countered with a blockade to prevent the removal of their gaming machines. The result of this action by the Yavapai blockade opened compact negotiations between Governor Symington and the Arizona Indian tribes. This resulted in the growth in tribal gaming casinos along with increased political and economic influence for the Arizona Indian tribes. My conclusion explains the current state of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Indian Nation and describes the benefits from Indian casino gaming in the greater Phoenix area.
ContributorsAlflen, Louise (Author) / Fixico, "Donald L (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Committee member) / Rush, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
There is no doubt that globalization has been a force in history , and especially in the past one hundred years. This is extremely evident in the implications of global epidemics. The global response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) revealed tensions between nation states and international health organization such as the World Health Organization) collectively called "Global Health Governance"). The issue was sovereignty. SARS showed us that there was more state-centric resistance to the Post-Westphalian world than previously thought. Where infectious diseases are concerned, however, the eventual compliance of states with the WHO shows reluctant but tacit compliance with international intervention.
ContributorsLaw, Stephanie (Author) / Rush, James (Thesis director) / Green, Monica (Committee member) / Lundry, Christopher (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2012-05
Description
This paper examines the development of United States drone policy outside of traditional battle zones. It poses the question of why do states use drones as a projection of force? In particular, the paper examines the expansion of the drone program within a system of democratic checks and balances. It looks at the effect that political and legal influences have had on the expansion of the drone program and hypothesizes that the presence of these constraints should increase drone use outside of traditional battle zones. In order to investigate this hypothesis, the paper looks at data on drone strikes from Yemen and Somalia. The data partially supports the hypothesis as there has not been a clear linear increase in the number of drone strikes in each of these countries. Nevertheless, an examination of the surrounding literature regarding political and legal influences within these countries seems to favorably point to the increase of drone operations. Future research, however, needs to be cognizant of the limitations in gathering specific statistics on drone operations as these operations are covert. It's also important to understand how the covert nature of the drone operations impacts issues regarding political oversight and legality. Lastly, it's important to constantly examine the broader implications drone policy has for US policy.
ContributorsRajan, Rohit Subramaniam (Author) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis director) / Rothenberg, Daniel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Civil conflicts with ethnic motivating factors are more likely to experience recurrence than nonethnic conflicts. In this paper I conduct a survival analysis on a group of 175 conflict episodes from 1946-2005. I argue that grievances based on religion, race, culture, language, and/or history are difficult to resolve due to the concept of indivisibility that makes compromise on ethnic issues unpopular. Along with Clausewitz’s theory on the influence of passion, chance, and reason in war, I also argue the importance of following clear objectives. When goals change over time, strategy becomes confounded and conflict recurrence increases. Utilizing the Cox Proportional Hazards model, the hazard rate is found to be significantly higher for ethnic conflicts than nonethnic conflicts. They also face shorter periods of peace. To highlight how ethnic mechanisms effect similar conflict scenarios, a case study of the first Indo-Pakistani and Chinese Civil War is made. I find that in the absence of ethnic grievances through China’s cultural assimilation campaigns, they were able to effectively curb violent disputes while India could not.
ContributorsNguyen-Morris, Kelly (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Committee member) / Siroky, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
In this dissertation, I investigate the causes of differences in the use of suicide terror by non-state armed groups, including magnitude of use, targeting decisions, and how reliant groups are on suicide attacks. I develop and test the propositions that the age of groups and the capability of the state military they face significantly impact the scale of use and targeting selection of their suicide attacks. Older groups are predicted to carry out a decreased number of suicide attacks in comparison with younger groups, but increase their focus on attacking hard targets and decrease their focus on attacking soft targets, due to older groups being more likely to possess skilled terror operatives and to follow traditional guerrilla warfare practices. Groups that began using suicide terror later in their existence are predicted to carry out less suicide attacks than groups that adopt the tactic earlier in their histories, due to organizations having increased reliance on established practices and procedures. Groups fighting strong state militaries are predicted to carry out more suicide attacks, a higher proportion of attacks on soft targets, and be more reliant on suicide terror than are groups fighting weak militaries, as increased military pressure on groups decreases the effectiveness of their individual attacks, reduces their ability to train skilled operatives, and increases their desperation and incentive to use unconventional tactics. I conduct a quantitative analysis of 140 groups from 1998-2012 and find that older groups and groups that adopt suicide terror later in their existence carry out less suicide attacks than younger groups and groups that adopt suicide terror earlier in their histories. I also find that groups respond to increases in state military personnel by carrying out more suicide attacks overall, a higher proportion of suicide attacks against soft targets, a lower proportion against hard targets, and by becoming more reliant on suicide terror. These dynamics are also illustrated in depth through case study analysis of suicide terror campaigns by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)/Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which represent two distinct models of suicide terror.
ContributorsGoldenberg, Samuel Klapper (Author) / Wood, Reed (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis advisor) / Peterson, Timothy (Committee member) / Siroky, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation develops a theory on the strategic interaction between civilians and combatants in war zones. It builds on the emerging field of research on noncombatant self-protection mechanisms in civil wars and addresses two questions: first, once civilians have decided to organize a resistance campaign, why do they choose armed or unarmed methods of struggle? Second, how do armed groups respond to this challenge? Regarding resistance strategies, I argue norms against the use of violence determine the content of a campaign when a community depends on an external ally to organize the mobilization and such an actor has strong preferences for peaceful activism. Strategic factors (e.g., rebels’ reputation) are determinant when norm entrepreneurs are absent or fail to influence the community. Concerning groups’ reaction to a resistance campaign, the dissertation conducts one of the first comparisons of the effectiveness of these strategies. To do so, it advances a typology that distinguishes between moderate (i.e., protests) and radical strategies (either unarmed or armed self-protection) and proposes two game-theoretic models of the civilian-combatant interaction in war zones. These models predict that rebels are more likely to repress radical rather than moderate strategies. The dissertation tests this theory with statistical methods and a novel dataset on resistance campaigns in Colombia (1985-2005). It explores the Catholic Church's promotion of peaceful activism against the war in this country and tests the theory on the civilian choice of strategy with multilevel multinomial models. This empirical method yields robust evidence to the theory: when encountering a rebel group with a negative reputation, civilians are more likely to organize violent self-protection rather than peaceful activism. In contrast, when there is a powerful third party with the leverage and resolution to promote nonviolent action, civilians are more willing to undertake a peaceful mobilization rather than create a militia. The empirical expectations concerning the warring parties’ reaction to civilian dissent are examined with methods for causal inference with panel data. The dissertation corroborates that protests can compel insurgents to make concessions to the population. In contrast, rebels tend to harshly retaliate against communities that escalate a campaign with violent tactics.
ContributorsOrtega Poveda, Pablo Alberto (Author) / Wood, Reed (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis advisor) / Hechter, Michael (Committee member) / Kaplan, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
I explore the relationship between social constructions of target audiences and the impact of these constructions on policy outcomes in the context of two drug crises: the crack epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s and the opioid crisis that began in the first decade of the 2000s. Using a content analysis of media depictions of the drug users during each crisis, I find that racialized depictions of drug users are used to reinforce stereotypes of either deviant or dependent classifications of the target audience. These social constructions are combined in the media coverage with suggested policy frames appealing to the necessity criminal justice and/or public health approaches to policy agenda used to address the drug crisis. These frames and social constructions help explain the disparate policy approaches employed in both eras.
ContributorsMcCubbins, Amanda Rose (Author) / Fridkin, Kim (Thesis advisor) / Hero, Rodney (Committee member) / Wright, Thorin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Although politically motivated suicides have spawned some of the largest and most impactful protest movements in recent memory, there remains a lack of research on similarities between events. Previously, each famous suicide has been taken to be a random phenomenon, which cannot be replicated. This paper serves to demystify the concept of politically motivated suicides, and to draw connections between events; this research is undertaken with the acknowledgement that these world shaping events are rarely the first politically motivated suicides in their time. Two main factors combine to spell success for these events. The presence of symbolic and powerful images, and messages from the death of an actor, combined with a social group which is able to harness and direct those images, determines the potential for a politically motivated suicide to escalate issues to a national scale. In this paper I connect litterature on the individual action of politically motivated suicide with the collective action field, and through a series of case studies investigate the importance of the action of suicide, and how social groups utilize the death of the actor. This change in thought reflects the concept that specific factors, not chance, combine to determine the outcome of these potentially nation changing events.
ContributorsFassbender, Eric Robert (Author) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis advisor) / Kirkpatrick, Jennet (Committee member) / Bates, Denise (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This thesis compares and contrasts attitudes on the issue of gun control between the general population and a student sample in the United States today. Through a comparative survey analysis design, this study aims to better understand attitudes towards gun control in the United States. Due to the fact that students may believe they are at a higher risk of gun violence, and because of their increased participation in gun control activism, this thesis hypothesizes that students will be more likely to favor restrictions on gun regulation. Although both samples share similar attitudes, these results show that students held much more passionate, negative, and dissatisfied attitudes and opinions on the current gun climate in the United States, relative to the general public. However, students are less in favor than the sample of the general public in supporting gun-safety policies when in the context of school-settings.
ContributorsDeutsch, Ryan Michael (Author) / Fridkin, Kim (Thesis advisor) / Kenney, Patrick (Committee member) / Wright, Thorin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020