| Military interventions in the post-Cold War era---including both multilateral humanitarian interventions during the 1990s and American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq---have brought to the forefront of public debate and political analysis questions of "nation-building." These interventions have been notable in the extraordinary ambition of the objectives they have sought---ending conflict, reconstituting failed states, and establishing democratic governments. The record of these ventures has been decidedly poor---with some exceptions. Very few such interventions have achieved democratic transitions, some have resulted in total chaos, and some have muddled through somewhere in between. My dissertation seeks to account for this record. Specifically, it asks: What explains the variation in outcomes of intervention efforts that have set democratization as one of their goals?;The dissertation lays out empirical and theoretical puzzles that motivate this question, evaluates alternative explanations, advances an argument to account for variation in intervention outcomes, and tests the argument in a range of historical cases. I argue that there is a fundamental distinction between state-building and democratization as objectives for post-conflict intervention. In particular, the types of things that an intervening power might have to do build a state may in fact undermine the process of democratization. The tradeoffs among the different goals set by an intervention can help explain the setbacks and failures observed in so many instances of post-conflict intervention. |
