Narrative decisionmaking and the Clinton administration's peacekeeping experiment

In this dissertation I propose a reconceptualization of the political decisionmaker and the policymaking process. I argue that traditional political science approaches do not accurately capture the way in which political decisions are actually or the essence of what decisions are actually about. I contend that the central concern of political life is a search for meaning. That the decision process is, at its core, an attempt to figure out how to act in the world in a meaningful way. The principal mechanism through which all humans apprehend the world and create meaning is culturally based narratives. I extend this insight to political decisionmakers and argue that policymakers are natural storytellers who understand and act in the world according to ever evolving, culturally based political narratives.; A narrative approach is particularly revealing in those historical moments when the prevailing storyline falls apart such as the post-Cold War period, and in policy arenas that fall outside of traditional conceptions of interest such as humanitarian operations. I examine the Clinton Administration's peacekeeping policy in Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti from a narrative perspective. I find that the Clinton Administration used its peacekeeping policy as a vehicle for acting out a particular vision of America and a new post-Cold War international order. In each of the three cases the administration's ideas about order and purpose were conveyed in story form. Once deployed, a good story can and did capture the policy process in a way that made some outcomes more likely and foreclosed others.