Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy

With Monica Duffy Toft

Oxford University Press (2023)

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From the beginning of its statehood to its modern-day realities, Dying by the Sword explores the U.S.’s evolving foreign policies across the eras, using both compelling historical narratives and new data patterns, to ring the alarm on the U.S.’s rising global kinetic diplomacy and militarism.

The book finds that since the end of the Cold War and especially post-9/11, the US has initiated higher rates of military interventions, drastically escalating its usage of force abroad. Lacking clear national strategic goals, the US now pursues a security whack-a-mole policy, more reactionary than deliberate. The book dedicates a chapter to exploring each defining era of US foreign policy, applying selected historical narratives, anecdotes of US foreign policy officials, case studies, and new patterns derived from the data in the Military Intervention Project (MIP).

Each chapter highlights the ways in which the US used and balanced primary tools of statecraft—War, Trade, and Diplomacy—to achieve its objectives. It showcases, however, that in recent decades, the US has heavily favored force over the other pillars of statecraft. The book concludes with a warning that if the US does not stem these increasing trends of kinetic diplomacy, it may do irrevocable damage to its diplomatic corps, dooming itself to costly wars of choice. If this trend continues, it could spell disaster for the US's image, credibility, and ultimately, its international and domestic stability.

From Kosovo to Darfur: Why Military Humanitarianism Favors the West

Forthcoming via The University of Michigan Press

Humanitarian military interventions characterized the political atmosphere of the 1990s, legitimizing the phenomenon in which third-party actors use force to end intrastate abuses. While calls for humanitarian military intervention remain numerous, the phenomenon is laden with grave skepticism given the large inconsistencies in mission patterns. The international community continues to ignore the decades-long suffering in Darfur, dismisses the genocidal policies within Myanmar, and even perpetuates the suffering in contemporary Yemen. At the same time, powerful states and institutions undertake humanitarian-laden missions in Libya, Syria, and the Balkans. Such patterns prompt the question – why do humanitarian military interventions occur in reaction to certain internal violent crises while they remain absent in others?

With the field of international relations “ripe for the thoughtful development of theories and tests bound by time and region,”[1] this book offers the first regionally-sensitive analysis of humanitarian military intervention since the end of the Cold War. It asks, why are some violent crises more likely to prompt humanitarian military interventions than others? In From Kosovo to Darfur, I argue that biased regional institutions, fueled by perceptions of the internal conflict, drive patterns of humanitarian military intervention, making interventions geographically and culturally closer to the West most probable and most intense. This regional support must be activated by favorable perceptions of the violent conflict, such as portraying a crisis as systematic killing of civilians or as genocide – not ethnic or identity civil wars. Thus, powerful states’ and leaders’ perceptions about a distant conflict can have paramount effects on what these actors propose as solutions to the violence.

To show this, From Kosovo to Darfur brings together new data of all post-Cold War internal armed conflicts and third-party responses, as well as in-depth case studies of crises. Relying on multi-lingual fieldwork and case studies on Kosovo, Libya, and Darfur, the book traces how conflict perceptions across Western audiences – from narrating a crisis as either civil war, systematic killings, or genocide – dramatically alter pathways of intervention. As our international community becomes increasingly interdependent and aware of human suffering across borders, this book becomes pivotal to uncovering the successes, mistakes, and biases that mark the line between state interests and human rights promotion.

The book concludes that once a threshold of humanitarian suffering is met via the existence of an internal armed conflict, powerful states and coalitions will intervene depending on: 1.) whether the conflict occurs in the “Western neighborhood” and 2.) whether it is denoted as an ethnic or religious civil war. A Western region coupled with no perceptions of identity-based civil war prompts the greatest odds of humanitarian intervention.

Such conclusions carry strong theoretical implications on the role of norms, ethics, and interests in international politics, as biased by region. The findings also point to new pathways of conflict trajectories and offer vital implications for leaders, scholars, and non-governmental actors advocating for or against international military intervention as a policy choice.

[1] Pickering, Jeffrey and David F. Mitchell. 2017. “Empirical Knowledge on Foreign Military Intervention.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.