Suchergebnisse

Despite the fact that international courts have proven popular in the last 20 years, systematic and empirical inquiry to determine whether they are beginning to realize their objectives is a fairly recent phenomenon. Support among the publics in the affected countries is critical to their success for, as deGuzman writes, '… the globalization of communications increasingly means that an institution's legitimacy depends on the opinions of ordinary citizens around the world'. I develop a theory of public opinion regarding international criminal justice and test it on support for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), among peoples of the former Yugoslavia. I contend that support for the ICTY is filtered through individuals' perceptions of the past, present, and future. As one's beliefs about whether conditions are good or improving grow more positive, such positive perceptions are generalized to extend to international institutions that play a major role in shaping those conditions. In addition, I argue that support for the ICTY is strongly influenced by an individual's views of the legitimacy and morality of the law. Ethnicity is also important in differentiating levels of support across the peoples of the former Yugoslavia.

Objective. I develop a theory of judicial decision making at the international tribunals regarding the punishment of those who have committed violations of international law. Previous research has found and criticized inconsistent sentencing at the tribunals, but I argue that we can explain such sentences through a theoretical framework that outlines how judges utilize the traditional punishment rationales of retribution and deterrence.Methods. Regression analysis is conducted using original data on the sentences passed on 132 individuals from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL).Results. I find significant support for the importance of each of the sentencing rationales.Conclusions. Tribunal judges sentence in a consistent manner premised on domestic and international rationales.

I argue that decision-making processes by the president and the national security establishment and a conception of past US military operations as credibility-establishing precedents for future US military actions have tended to result in a fixation on political developments occurring in a relatively small number of nations. Together, these foreign-policy making routines produce a high degree of regularity in US military activities whose importance is not often appreciated in studies that emphasize more variable domestic political forces, such as diversionary theory, or traditional security concerns, such as realism. I use both a zero-inflated, negative binomial model and a proportional hazards model to illustrate the impact of past US militarized dispute behavior on the prospects for future military activity. I find that past US conflict behavior exercises the most important influence in both models.

Since the 1970s, and especially again since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a considerable body of literature has addressed the nature, causes, and consequences of the relative decline of United States power. Of particular interest is research that suggests the US is guilty of the same kind of imperial overstretch that brought down the Spanish in the 17th century and the British in the first half of the 20th century. Imperial overstretch, or a lack of balance between militarized foreign policy commitments and the resources needed to sustain those interests has, according to some scholars, weakened American power abroad by placing too many demands on the US armed services and scattering them about the globe. I discuss the literature on US foreign policy and hegemonic decline to sort out the various arguments, and to begin to identify the key issues and terms. I argue that one of the reasons why there has been insufficient theoretical progress in this debate is that its terms have been variously and ill-defined. I seek to remedy this problem by developing a model of US foreign policy that provides a clearly defined set of explanatory factors that will allow us to assess the relative impact of demand factors, such as international threats, and supply factors, such as the resource base of the US government. I test the model using time series analysis on US military policy data that span the Cold War and post—Cold War era and find that many of the arguments advanced by the imperial overstretch theorists are not supported.

A memoriam for Steven Poe.

The reconstruction and maintenance of peaceful communities in the aftermath of conflicts is one of the most critical areas of concern for both policymakers and scholars. This article examines explanations of the level of societal peace - the degree of conflict and/or cooperation in a society - and the extent to which internationally provided justice contributes to the maintenance of peaceful societies. In particular, it investigates the efforts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to provide justice for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina by analyzing the impact of the arrests and judgments of war criminals on societal peace in Bosnia. Some research suggests that internationally provided justice is critical to peace and reconciliation; some scholars argue that such attempts can do more harm than good by inflaming ethnic violence; while still other research contends that its effects are limited at best. Using event data from the Kansas Event Data System, it is found that the arrests and judgments of war criminals had only a limited effect on improving relations among Bosnia's ethnic groups. Mostly, the apprehension and judgments of suspected war criminals had no statistically significant effect.