How did you come to choose your research topic?
The dissertation’s broader questions of why and when external actors in the international system choose to respond to burgeoning political violence targeting civilians emerged from formative experiences several decades ago as a US Peace Corps volunteer in rural West Africa. I became interested in the construction and manipulation of political identity by elite entrepreneurs within the context of electoral competition arising from post–Cold War democratisation, and its linkages to violence targeting civilians. This variation across the coastal sub-region (from Sierra Leone to Nigeria in those days), its causes and consequences, and the role of domestic and (particularly) international actors in its production presented multiple ethical, moral, and analytical questions, steering me toward an intellectual interest in political violence and conflict analysis writ large, with a focus on operational early warning and prevention.
I continued to pursue these lines of inquiry through travel and research primarily in continental Africa and Asia in the subsequent years, visiting historical sites of mass killing in Poland, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, and eventually through graduate study at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where I studied International Security Policy (ISP) with a sub-focus in conflict resolution. During the ensuing years I developed a nuanced understanding of theory, both the ontology and strategic logic and mechanisms for mass atrocities, but also in practice as I observed the same refrain while working on conflict and atrocity early-warning mechanisms globally – the persistent question of political will. These responses in the mid-to-late 2000s were consistently that extant early warning mechanisms (second- and third-generation in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time) fulfilled their technical function (structural and proximate) relatively well, but it was an inability to predict triggers and, most importantly from the practitioner perspective, a lack of political will among external actors that prevented effective response. Research I helped facilitate – before my arrival at the Geneva Graduate Institute – on African regional communities and their violence prevention and response capabilities again reinforced the centrality of political will as a core explanatory variable for atrocity prevention. This theme strikes at the heart of what Alexander George and Jane Holl had previously identified in the literature as the warning–response gap in effective conflict prevention in international relations.
In my doctoral research in Geneva, I sought to isolate this oft-cited yet rarely defined or theorised concept, and provide more conceptual understanding to what one professor of the Institute remarked was this “woolly” notion of political will. My task after conceptualisation was developing a typology and measurement for political will before examining its spatial and temporal variation across the post–Cold War universe of mass atrocity cases to better understand both its determinants and role in the production of international response to mass atrocities.
Can you describe your thesis questions and the methodology you use to approach those questions?
The framing question for the research is why some external actors in the international system devote considerable resources in both state blood and national treasure to protect civilians while other do not. What explains this variation in state behaviour? The post–Cold War record details stark cases of robust response in both blood and treasure against a grim record of scant empirical response. If the so-called international community always or never responded to mass atrocities targeting civilians, there would be no research puzzle to explore. However, one observes considerable variation in international response even into 2024 with Ethiopia, Ukraine, and Israel/Palestine as the most recent conflagrations exhibiting civilian targeting with concomitant accusations of atrocity crimes, and stark variation in international response.
My doctoral thesis composes a triptych that examines the pillars of international conflict prevention beginning with a paper titled Reflections on the Evolution of Conflict Early Warning, which provides a descriptive review of broader conflict prevention in IR and the related development of violence early warning systems across time and space, with a specific focus on operationalising supranational mechanisms since the 1990s. In doing so, it identifies aforementioned early warning, political will, and capacity as three explanatory variables for violence prevention.
The second paper, Conceptualizing Political Will in Mass Atrocity Response, builds on insights from the above paper by first conceptualising political will, and then positioning it as the primary independent variable for explaining variation in state behaviour in atrocity response. The paper begins by contextualising mass atrocities across time and space, from antiquity to the late modern era, including its definition, causes, and characteristics. It then conceptualises the primary explanatory variable, political will, across knowledge domains, as a multidimensional, multilevel construct, and situates the concept within the context of mass atrocity response. I develop a conceptual typology of political will along two core dimensions of attention and valence. This typology includes a four-level ordinal scaling of political will with types ranging from token to interventionist. I then populate this typology with relevant cases from the post–Cold War universe of mass atrocities. I next turn my attention to the outcome variable, state behaviour, and construct a five-level ordinal scaling consisting of policy actions that constitute external response to atrocities. By then examining selected relevant cases from the typology, I isolate political will as a core explanatory factor for varying levels of state action in the context of atrocity response. This paper builds upon the first paper by identifying how early warning and response capacity alone are limiting as explanations for why states respond or fail to respond to impending or ongoing atrocities targeting civilians.
The third paper in the series, Beyond Blood and Treasure: Political Will and State Behavior in Mass Atrocity Response, shares the name of the overall thesis and is an empirical work targeting the observed atrocity warning–response gap by elucidating and testing explanations for variation in levels of state intervention in atrocity response. The literatures on risk (including forecasting under uncertainty), political and evolutionary psychology, humanitarian intervention, and insights from over three decades of advancement of scholarship on mass atrocities are of particular utility for understanding and explaining variation in external political will to protect civilians from genocide and other forms of mass atrocities. Using Mill’s method of concomitant variation, I deploy a controlled comparison leveraging evidence on US response to burgeoning atrocities in Libya and Syria to explain how variation in political will among elite, state-level policymaking units explain much of the variation in external response to atrocities targeting civilians and non-combatants.
What are your major findings?
My findings are addressed to the discrete constellation of actors that compose external policymaking units in international relations that have the legitimacy and, crucially, the capacity to respond to potential or real atrocity violence targeting civilians. The unit of analysis isolated these elite decision makers, who comprise national security teams that are under a specific set of political constraints and that make consequential decisions under considerable uncertainty within short-time horizons. I argue that the type of political will, from token to interventionist, triggered by the threat of atrocities against civilians explains much of the variation in state behaviour operationalised as level of response to atrocities. I detail a mechanism linking political will to state response in which external actors facing this international collective action problem seek out coalitions of like-minded states and these coalitions dampen both the threat of free-riding and domestic audience costs for responsive action, particularly as those actions rise along a continuum of expenditure from treasure to blood to achieve policy objects.
What are the policy implications of these findings?
These findings have implications for understanding how international actors respond to impending or ongoing atrocity violence against civilians, helping explain why some states accept great risk in both blood and treasure to protect civilians from ongoing or potential atrocities, while most others with the capacity to intervene do not.
The topic and research questions are of significance to IR scholarship and practice, including normative discussions of state responsibility to protect civilians in times of conflict. In the course of my research these persistent questions reemerged and have dominated discourse in conflagrations as heterogenous as Ethiopia, Ukraine, and Israel/Palestine. The three-paper series offers a look at the past-present and near-future of conflict studies in IR. The future of atrocity research holds significant promise in better understanding both the causes and mechanisms for atrocities to emerge on the one hand, and the potential of artificial intelligence and eventually quantum computing working in tandem to inform decision-makers with risk-reducing decision options in real time to forestall the onset of atrocities. This ability to attenuate the warning–response gap with robust and verifiable policy options remains the grand objective of the decades of technical development in atrocity prevention and response.
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Mark Andrew Whitlock defended his PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science on 13 June 2024. Emeritus Professor David Sylvan presided over the committee, which included Professor Ravinder Bhavnani, Thesis Director, and, as External Reader, Professor James W. Davis, Institute of Political Science, University of St. Gallen.
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Whitlock, Mark Andrew. “Beyond Blood and Treasure: Political Will and State Behavior in Mass Atrocity Response.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2024.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Whitlock.
Banner image: Shutterstock/lev radin.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.