Richard Price

Ever since the 1990s and 2000s, the aid architecture in conflict-affected states frequently contains elements related to the promotion of gender equality and the elimination of gender-based violence (GBV), usually under the broader rubric of the gender mainstreaming and Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agendas. While this has contributed to successes in ensuring that domestic discourse and policy reflect women’s rights and protections, seldom does the formalization of gender equality and the elimination of GBV translate into real improvements. Utilizing the granular details of the everyday politics of customary chiefs’ courts, the mobilization of community-embedded armed groups and the organization of urban gangs in South Sudan, this dissertation shows how international norms related to gender equality and violence get caught up in the contestation over the limits and extent of state power. It unfolds in two key ways. First, it shows how gendered inequality and violence, including conflict-related sexual violence are, in part, a function of the complex confluence of the cooptation by, and resistance to, different forms of state power over the course of the 20th century in South Sudan. Second, it shows how policy responses have tended to treat state and non-state actors as mutually exclusive, failing to recognize the contestation taking place over how authority will be configured in ways that have limited the purchase and reach of international norms. The argument and the empirical details that this dissertation relies on provide important insight into the factors that condition the movement from commitment to compliance in target states by showing how the norms that external actors promote get caught up in the very gendered ways that local politics unfolds, mediating the influence of international efforts. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of destabilizing more conventional distinctions employed in both social constructivism and policy responses that have mostly interrogated compliance by either state or non-state actors, rather than looking at their interaction and the fluid lines between them as essential to both the understanding and resolution of compliance problems.

View record

The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.

View record

It is estimated that since the Global War on Terror began in 2001, these wars have directly caused the deaths of 897,000 to 929,000 people, including 364,000 civilians (Cost of War Project, 2022). While efforts to mitigate civilian harm have grown, significantly less attention has been paid to what happens when civilian harm does, inevitably, occur. Theorized by counterinsurgency specialists to reduce or mitigate some of the population-centric strategic costs associated with civilian harm incidents caused by counterinsurgency forces, civilian harm response and compensation has become a central consequence management strategy used by Coalition forces in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. They are thought to assist counterinsurgents to obtain, retain, or regain legitimacy amongst affected communities in the aftermath of civilian harm incidents. However, efforts to respond to civilian harm incidents have varied widely in practice. Approaches, processes, and amounts of compensation have ranged widely across cases, begging the question— does civilian harm response and compensation ‘work?’ This study argues that for civilian harm response and compensation to be effective in contributing to counterinsurgency goals they must be designed with the needs and expectations of affected survivors, their families, and communities at the centre. In order to demonstrate this theory, I present evidence using process tracing and qualitative comparative techniques to analyze a wealth of primary and secondary data garnered from archival and interview-based research conducted in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. I show that in these contexts how militaries respond to civilian harm incidents matters greatly to achieving their strategic objectives and securing the central objective of counterinsurgencies—legitimacy—in the aftermath of civilian harm. In all nine cases, I demonstrate that it is only when the needs and expectations of survivors, their families, and communities are prioritized and embedded into the response and compensation approach that these can mechanisms contribute positively to counterinsurgency’s legitimacy-centric objectives.

View record

In armed conflicts around the world, armed groups recruit child soldiers into their organisations to fill a wide range of roles. In response, transnational advocacy networks have been mobilised to name-and-shame such armed groups and seek an end to this humanitarian concern through asserting the norm against the use of child soldiers. Some armed groups respond to this advocacy, and demobilise their child soldiers, while others ignore international pressure. There is a puzzle here: why do some armed groups demobilize child soldiers, while others do not? What makes armed groups more or less responsive to advocacy? I argue that some armed groups are engaging with the child soldiers norm in order to gain legitimacy from international audiences. Evidence shows that the armed groups that do this are those who have a large domestic support base but are losing their armed struggle. Armed groups do not engage with the norm if they are winning their struggle, or if they are losing and do not have a large domestic support base. In order to demonstrate this theory, I present evidence from qualitative interview-based research conducted in Syria and Myanmar in 2012 and 2013. I show that in these two dramatically different conflicts, armed groups follow the same forms of behavior. In both cases, it is only when groups are losing but have support, that they will dialogue with transnational advocacy networks in order to engage with the child soldiers norm and acquire international legitimacy.

View record

How do cooperative rules and agreements emerge in anarchical situations of political conflict between or within states? This dissertation responds to this question by developing an innovative theory of the role that deliberation plays in the emergence of rule-based cooperation under anarchy. “Deliberation” refers to a kind of political talk in which participants attempt to persuade each other on the basis of convincing reasons. Deliberation promises to be an important vehicle through which political opponents make and follow cooperative rules together. The problem, however, is that because deliberation has primarily been studied in the context of strong, liberal-democratic states, we do not yet have an adequate understanding of how it can be effective under more anarchical conditions. Without the security provided by strong institutions and relatively thick “lifeworlds” of shared culture and norms, deliberative responses to politics are more likely to be scuttled by mistrust and mutual suspicion.The theory developed here addresses this challenge by highlighting and investigating the often-overlooked relational effects of deliberation. Deliberation is not just about the content of the reasons political opponents offer one another. It is also about the fact that they are offering reasons at all, and about what that implies for the kind of actions they can expect from each other. Most importantly, deliberation can be a way for interlocutors to demonstrate their accountability to each other: their willingness to uphold, and count on others to uphold, shared standards of behaviour. In this way deliberation can help to generate the bonds of trust and mutually acknowledged commitment that political opponents need in order to act on shared rules and understandings. In developing this theory, the dissertation offers new conceptual tools for understanding how productive politics, based on negotiation, persuasion, and shared rules, can get a toehold even under difficult conditions.

View record

There are widespread concerns that those people who ought to benefit from global governance are instead ignored, disempowered or harmed by it. Central to these concerns, this dissertation argues, is the principle of inclusion. Bringing together normative and empirical inquiry, this dissertation explains why inclusion matters and how it might be achieved in global governance, and uses this approach to assess the oft-criticized relationship between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and victims of international crimes. Inclusion is crucial for both justice and democratic legitimacy. Inclusion can empower constituencies to address injustices they face and negotiate what justice should entail. Inclusion is also necessary to address democratic deficits in global governance, when constituencies are excluded from decision-making processes that significantly affect them. The complexity and large scale of global governance make inclusion difficult to conceptualize and promote. Building on democratic theory, this dissertation proposes the framework of mediated inclusion, which identifies the key activities of representation and communication needed for constituencies to understand and influence decision-making. It then engages with International Relations scholarship to identify actors, institutional design features and contexts that can promote or frustrate the inclusion of the intended beneficiaries of global governance. This analysis reveals both persistent challenges and positive trends in opportunities for inclusion at international organizations. These insights are used to assess the inclusion of victims in the creation and operations of the ICC. This analysis draws on over 100 interviews with ICC staff, state officials and civil society members, as well as focus groups with survivors of violence in Uganda and Kenya. Close examination of negotiations to create the ICC reveals how advocates for victims’ rights achieved a strong legal framework for victim inclusion. Case studies of the ICC’s interventions in Uganda and Kenya evaluate diverse advocates for victims, and identify opportunities and limitations for victim inclusion in judicial, bureaucratic and diplomatic decision-making sites. Contributing to debates on global democracy, transnational advocacy, international organization design and international criminal justice, this dissertation shows how the principle of inclusion can be used to critically assess global governance and to create institutions that are more legitimate and just.

View record

“How is it that there is such a concern for the security of humanitarian workers?” A glance at the legal, policy, humanitarian, academic and business spheres reveals a widespread and strong commitment to the security of humanitarian workers. While it may appear obvious that these actors should not be victims of security incidents, upon scrutiny, the prominence of this notion – which I term the “norm of humanitarian security” – is surprising. Concern for the security of humanitarian workers is startling considering the enduring ambiguity of what or who humanitarian workers are, and the fact that these actors perform work that has, for years, faced serious critiques.In view of this state of affairs, this dissertation asks: “how is it that humanitarian workers came to be perceived as inviolate actors?” I attend to this question by tracing a genealogy of the norm of humanitarian security. After outlining the emergence of the humanitarian worker as actor, I show how the norm of humanitarian security developed and gained prominence in the 1990s. I argue that this development was greatly informed by states’ commitment to the delivery of humanitarian assistance to which the security of humanitarian workers was perceived as central. States’ changing paradigm of engagement in humanitarian affairs in the post-2001 period contributed to the norm of humanitarian security becoming a stand-alone norm. This occasioned a shift in which violations of the norm went from being portrayed as problematic owing to their impact on the delivery of humanitarian assistance, to being perceived as problematic in and of themselves.This research makes an important contribution to the literature on norms – by providing the first study of the norm of humanitarian security; the literature on humanitarianism – by shedding light on the evolution of the notion of humanitarian worker and showing the interplay between the evolution of the humanitarian sphere and the humanitarian worker; and to the literature on the security of humanitarian workers – by providing a historically situated account of its object of study.

View record

Can international treaties generate broadly influential norms when the legal agreements themselves are rejected by the most powerful states in the international system? Despite valuable scholarship focusing on their initial creation of “non-great power” treaties, few studies have sought to systematically examine the subsequent impact of these initiatives. The present dissertation addresses this gap through a detailed assessment of two archetypal cases, the Antipersonnel Mine Ban Treaty and Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. To do so, I develop a theory of treaty influence that emphasizes the role of legal instruments in generating international norms, and an associated methodology to identify these social effects. I argue that treaty members may build a community of obligation without the direct support of powerful states, and that these efforts may come to implicate even those states that resist the binding commitments of the legal agreement. The Mine Ban Treaty and Rome Statute have thus powerfully shaped the way in which states across the international system conceive of appropriate conduct with respect to the use of certain weapons and the punishment of grave international crimes. The extensive changes in state practice and discourse are particularly notable since both treaties seek to overturn a prior international consensus that permitted vastly different behaviour.This dissertation has important implications for both international relations theory and practice. Most generally, I demonstrate that influential international laws and norms need not depend on great power leadership, and may derive from a broader array of actors including middle powers and non-governmental coalitions. Ultimately, I argue that the strategic calculation adopted by treaty proponents—that global norms can be more effectively promoted via rigorous treaties with incomplete membership, rather than by weaker agreements initially endorsed by great powers—presents a viable pathway to generating widely respected international norms. In this sense, the focus of the present research is applicable to a wide array of current and prospective regulatory efforts in fields such as global finance and trade, security, human rights and the environment.

View record

What is the effect of developing nuclear weapons on a state’s conflict propensity? Extant answers to this question do not model the effects of time and thus leave policy-makers addressing cases such as Iran and North Korea with two contradictory answers – that nuclear proliferation is stabilising and destabilising – that both have extensive empirical support. I argue that nuclear proliferation is dangerous when decision-makers learn that it is safe and safe when they learn it to be dangerous. I develop and test a psychological nuclear learning model that, consistent with recent quantitative research, explains why weak, revisionist/dissatisfied nuclear powers are highly conflict prone but the same experienced nuclear powers are not. In the model, three biases associated with the availability heuristic make weak revisionist new nuclear powers war prone. (1) Illusory correlations cause decision-makers to believe that the immense destructive potential of nuclear weapons causes them to offer similarly large coercive power; (2) self-serving attribution biases cause decision-makers to infer a causal relationship between nuclear compellence threats and subsequent compliance and (3) decision-maker’s nuclear threats, because they are more cognitively accessible than other contextual variables and the operation of these variables in historical cases, cause them to overestimate the probability of successful nuclear coercion. Such new nuclear powers inevitably practice nuclear coercion, which causes a nuclear crisis and fear of imminent nuclear war. I show that this fear moderates the high war propensity of new nuclear powers. It causes (1) pessimistic estimates of the probability of inadvertent nuclear escalation resulting from nuclear coercion, (2) moderation in future nuclear diplomacy and (3) pessimistic risk choices in logically unrelated foreign policies. Recently released Soviet archival data and elite interviews in South Asia, including with former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, allow me to test the psychological nuclear learning model against realist, domestic politics and rational learning models.

View record

Observing challenges in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kosovo, East Timor, and Libya, to name a few, there is no doubt that peacebuilding—international efforts to create lasting peace in post-conflict states — is a critical issue in world politics. It appears to be a widely shared understanding among both scholars and policymakers that it is imperative for the peacebuilders—both international and domestic authorities in charge of creating peace—to obtain legitimacy in reconstructing war-torn states. Surprisingly, however, concrete methods or policies to construct legitimacy in “host states” have not been fully examined by either IR theorists or practitioners. The objective of this dissertation is to develop an understanding of the mechanism of constructing or eroding the legitimacy of newly created domestic governments in the specific context of peacebuilding. The existing accounts basically contend that constructing legitimate governments in post-conflict states largely depends on the level of force and level of resource distribution (or “guns and money”). On the contrary, my argument emphasizes that in addition to those two factors, other factors, such as inclusive governments reconciling with political adversaries and the substantial role of international organizations as a credible third party to establish the fairness and neutrality of the political process, are very critical in building the legitimacy of the domestic governments in the long run. In order to assess this argument, the dissertation conducts detailed process tracing to assess peacebuilding in Afghanistan as a primary case, demonstrating how the legitimacy of the Afghan government has been eroded. The dissertation also assesses the cases of Iraq, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste (East Timor) in more concise fashion. All four cases support my argument about the requirements for an inclusive political process in peacebuilding as well as the important role of the UN which has often been dismissed by its critics. The research suggests important policy implications for peacebuilding and contributes to generating a theory that can be assessed by future studies.

View record

Transitional justice is a field of research that has benefited from an array of scholarship on accountability for atrocities, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. But the emphasis on varieties of institutional design, such as trials and truth commissions, and the primacy of pragmatic and context-specific variables have obscured the fact that transitional justice is increasingly a norm-driven practice. The field, however, lacks a theoretical framework from which to assess the international norms that consistently have causal effects in diverse contexts and over the past decades in which the normative structure has evolved. I argue that the international normative structure of transitional justice is defined by four interrelated norms: a hierarchical division of criminality, accountability, localization, and reconciliation. The primary contribution of this dissertation is to explain the effects of this structure with a comparative analysis of each norm’s salience and implementation. I therefore juxtapose what is expected in principle to what is possible in practice. Measures of salience go beyond establishing if norms exist and determine how norms matter, as is shown by their role in shaping discourse, institutions and policies. Subsequently I contend that it is important to distinguish between implementation challenges that are institutional failures, such as a lack of capacity or politicization of the process, and those which are normative contestation, such as reinterpretations and challenges over how and whether a norm should be implemented in a certain context. While both can affect the legitimacy of transitional justice institutions, contestation in particular carries with it the possibility for change in the normative structure. The empirical focus analyzes the causal effects of the international normative structure, with the above measures, in Rwanda, East Timor, and the International Criminal Court. Individually, the case studies provide rich contextual detail on how the various norms shaped decision-making and institutions. The diversity in the transitional justice institutions is thus juxtaposed to the consistency in which the norms are salient across the cases and in their implementation challenges, lending credence to the influential effects of the international normative structure of transitional justice.

View record

Drawing upon an interdisciplinary synthesis of literature from political science, social psychology, and peace and conflict studies, this dissertation seeks to construct a theoretical framework capable of tracing the complex linkages between identity, transitional justice, and intergroup reconciliation in the post-conflict environments of deeply divided societies. An innovative ‘social learning’ model of this complex interrelationship is introduced, one which suggests that transitional justice strategies will be most successful in promoting intergroup reconciliation to the degree that they are able to catalyze crucial processes of instrumental, socioemotional, and distributive learning amongst former antagonists by promoting contact, dialogue, truth, justice, and the amelioration of structural and material inequalities – all factors identified in existing scholarship as necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for post-conflict reconciliation in divided societies. Employing a methodology of theoretically oriented systematic process analysis, this social learning model is tested through a critical examination of the very different transitional justice approaches adopted in South Africa and Northern Ireland. In South Africa, transitional justice centered on the highly regarded Truth and Reconciliation Commission, designed to address apartheid-era abuses committed between black and white South Africans. In Northern Ireland, a much more ‘decentralized’ approach has combined discrete government programs with an array of ‘bottom-up’ civil society initiatives to deal with the legacy of violence between Nationalist and Unionist communities committed during the ‘Troubles.’ Through extensive desk research and four months of qualitative field research conducted in 2008 (which included 85 in-depth expert interviews), suggestive evidence is found to support the underlying supposition that, at least in deeply divided societies, the causal relationship between transitional justice and reconciliation remains heavily mediated by the politics of identity. More specifically, in both Northern Ireland and South Africa, the transitional justice strategies employed appear to have been successful in contributing to post-conflict reconciliation to the extent to which they have been able to successfully promote a combination of the instrumental, socioemotional, and distributive forms of learning identified in the theoretical model. This study concludes by considering the policy implications of this analysis for ‘best practices’ in the design of future transitional justice strategies in deeply divided societies.

View record

This dissertation applies the concept of source cue effects – drawn from the political psychology literature – to the study of transnational persuasion in International Relations. As a theoretical contribution, it elaborates a set of hypotheses about the conditions under which transnational source cue effects are most likely to occur. As a substantive contribution, it focuses on how foreign publics’ perceptions of the United States and of the U.S. President shape U.S. soft power. It explores how the U.S. President’s global popularity shapes the U.S. government’s transnational persuasiveness and influences the United States’ country image, and investigates the ways in which a negative U.S. country image (anti-Americanism) constrains its foreign policy. The empirical contribution of this dissertation consists primarily of a set of original computer-based source cue and priming experiments administered to undergraduate students at the University of British Columbia in the spring and winter of 2009. The results of these experiments show that foreign actors like Presidents Obama and Clinton and the United States can exert source cue effects on a Canadian audience. Furthermore, they point to three key moderators of transnational source cue effects: 1) the popularity of the source in question, 2) the audience’s familiarity with the source, and 3) the way in which the message source is covered in the news media. The experiments also show that priming a popular U.S. President like Barack Obama significantly improves participants’ overall attitudes towards the United States when compared to their attitudes if an unpopular president like George W. Bush is primed. In a separate empirical analysis, the dissertation also uses a cross-national dataset to show that aggregate attitudes towards the United States were associated with state decisions to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and their subsequent decisions to withdraw their forces from the operation.

View record