The use of military force to promote human rights

The use of military force to promote human rights
James D. Meernik, Steven C. Poe, and
Erum Shaikh
Introduction
Among the major, stated goals of the military action in Iraq has been the US administration’s desire to replace the Saddam Hussein dictatorship with a regime that would serve as a model for human rights and democracy in the Middle East. Thought controversial by many because it may represent a bad precedent, as well as a sea change in American foreign policy, the use of force for these purposes is really not that unusual in a broad historical context. Throughout history, states have frequently used military force to impose political systems upon other societies. Owen (2002: 375) chronicled 198 such cases that have occurred since 1555. And like the current case, most such efforts have involved the forceful imposition of a regime by a powerful country on a weaker target state.
And in most of these the powerful state has sought to impose on the target country a set of political institutions that more closely resembles its own.
The extent to which such uses of force have been successful at bringing about more human rights in societies is debatable. Scholars are now beginning to analyze the success of attempts to impose liberal, democratic systems on nations (Fossedal 1989; Smith 1994; Peceny 1995, 1999; Meernik 1996; McDougall 1997; Hermann and Kegley 1998; Whitcomb 1998). Such research has emphasized the extent to which a system of democratic governance has been established in a nation whose prior regime did not subscribe to democratic norms. These analyses have largely focused on macro-level, systemic and constitutional changes in government institutions.
We are interested, however, in exploring the degree to which these uses of force have been able to effect change at the micro, or individual level. While regime change may presage an improvement of conditions in a society, the changes may only be in law and not in fact. The procedural aspects of democratization may be realized in the course of these military interventions, as new constitutions are written and elections held. Yet the substance of democracy may lag behind if elected officials and citizens do not fully subscribe to critical, democratic norms such as civil liberties, tolerance, and the foreswearance of violence as a political tool.
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One aim of this chapter is to provide the first assessment of whether these uses of force have acted to improve the substance of democracy – the right to speak one’s own mind, to practice one’s religion and simply to live peacefully, free of the fear of imprisonment and government-sponsored violence. As such, this study also constitutes a useful addition to the literature that seeks to ascertain the relationship between human rights and a variety of foreign policy tools (e.g., Stohl Carleton and Johnson 1984, Stohl and Carleton 1985; Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; McCormick and Mitchell 1988; Regan 1995; Poe and Sirirangsi 1994; Blanton 1994; 2000; Apodaca and Stohl 1999). Given the fact that the literature has examined the impact of foreign economic and military aid and arms transfers in some detail, it is rather surprising that no one has yet systematically analyzed the relationship between human rights and US uses of force, which are arguably the most serious of foreign policy commitments, and certainly the most visible. Most importantly of all, we seek to deepen our understanding of one of the key elements of a sustainable peace in nations that have undergone conflict – their level of human rights protection. Governments that abuse their citizens’ human rights may well be more likely to experience repeated patterns of internal and/or external forms of violence and conflict.
Their abusive policies may precipitate challenges from within and attempts from without to impose a new government more respectful of human rights. Thus, evaluating the extent to which uses of force result in an improvement of the human rights situation in the target state is critical to understanding the prospects of a sustainable peace in that society.
Toward this end, we will examine uses of force by the United States across all nations of the world, using data for the period 1977–1996. We find that the regimes that are subjected to uses of force by the United States are a distinct set of nations, distinguished from others by their regime types. Having examined which nations the USA has used force in, we next analyze our primary question of interest: the impact of such military
actions on the lives of people in the target nation. We argue that if US uses of force are indeed successful at promoting human rights, then the success or failure of uses of force is apt to be a function of their type, size, and duration.
Our findings indicate that though democracy and human rights are among the considerations that determine whether the USA does intervene in a particular case, these uses of force are ineffective at promoting improvements in these conditions.

Explaining the use of military force by the United States
To explain the consequences of US uses of military force, we begin by examining the events to which the USA is responding. We make one seemingly obvious, but important assumption – that United States foreign policymakers are more interested in some foreign crises than others. Our
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purpose is not to enumerate all the types of events and conditions that make some events of concern to US foreign policymakers and not others.
Instead, we seek to explain how a nation’s domestic political system and regime policies affect US foreign policy toward that nation. Are US foreign policymakers’ perceptions of the importance of a threat posed by some nation influenced in any degree by these domestic, political conditions in that country? And do such interests increase the likelihood that the United States will use military force to influence events in these nations? We believe the answer to both questions to be “yes.” The first step in our analysis of the relationship between human rights and the use of force is to explain why we believe internal political conditions influence the likelihood of US military action.
The promotion of liberalism and the US use of force
The United States has long been interested in promoting liberalist values in its foreign policies (Fossedal 1989; Smith 1994; Peceny 1995, 1999; Meernik 1996; McDougall 1997; Hermann and Kegley 1998; Whitcomb1998). In contrast to realists, who would argue that promoting democracy or human rights is rare in a security-oriented, anarchic international system, many of these scholars have found that the United States has increasingly used force to remake other societies. This is not altogether surprising for other researchers have argued that there are substantial opportunities and incentives for a powerful state to remake the world in its own image (Krasner 1978: 340) and to socialize leaders in other states to its norms and values (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). Indeed, even Hans Morgenthau (1973: 10) once wrote, “All nations are tempted—and few have been able to resist the temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe.”
Recent research by Owen (2002) confirms that states have forcibly imposed domestic institutions on other states throughout history. Ideologically inspired military interventions have seemingly become more feasible
and prevalent with the end of the Cold War, but as Peceny (1999) demonstrates, the USA embarked on such missions during and before the Cold War as well. Peceny finds that in almost one-third of US military interventions in the twentieth century, presidents sought to achieve liberal democratic aims abroad. Most recently, one of the five major objectives of US military strategy in the Annual Defense Report 2000 is fostering an international environment in which “Democratic norms and respect for human rights are widely accepted.”1
First, we hypothesize that the United States will be interested in the extent to which a nation subscribes to liberal, democratic values.
The democratic peace research program has shown that democratic regimes tend not to make war on each other (Maoz and Russett 1993; Owen 1994; Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992). More recently, scholars are finding
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that when democracies do enter conflicts, it is often because they are targeted by non-democratic states (Leeds and Davis 1999; Prins and Sprecher 1999). Democratic regimes also tend to be more co-operative in general in
their international behavior (Benoit 1996; Leeds and Davis 1999). Huth (1998) finds that major powers are more likely to intervene in conflicts when they are seeking to protect a politically similar regime from a third nation that does not share their polity characteristics. Polity type is highly predictive of how states treat one another because of the tendency for like states to flock together because of shared norms.
Second, and more importantly, we believe that the specific policies pursued by governments should also explain their proclivity for conflict involvement and the likelihood that the USA will use force against them.
Governments that are fair and responsive to their citizens do not provoke the scope or intensity of opposition that generates unrest at home and escalates into conflict with other regimes. For example, the states of
Europe tend not to provoke militarized, international crises by their policies toward their own citizens, while some governments in Africa and Asia have become enmeshed in crises because of their repressive nature.
Regimes that do not respect the human rights of their citizens are also typical of regimes that centralize power and possess far greater latitude to act repressively at home and aggressively abroad. Ultimately, repression and/or aggression are at the hub of most international crises and uses of force, and so we should find those states whose regimes utilize these tools as normal political practice will be the site of many of these crises of interest to the United States, and therefore will be targeted with military force.
Hypothesis 1: The United States will be more likely to use force the less democratic the target state.2
Hypothesis 2: The United States will be more likely use force the less respectful the target state is toward its citizens’ human rights.3
Initial bivariate explorations
The dependent variable, FORCE, is coded “1” for each country in the world for each year in which the USA used force and “0” otherwise in the period 1976–1996. Data on the political use of force were gathered from Blechman and Kaplan (1978), Job and Ostrom (1986), Zelikow (1987),
The Center for Naval Analyses: ‘The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era: U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps Crisis Response Activity, 1946–1990’, and the Global Security web site.4 A political use of military force short of war is defined by Blechman and Kaplan (1978: 12) as physical actions . . . taken by one or more components of the uniformed military services as part of a deliberate attempt by the national
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authorities to influence, or to be prepared to influence, specific behavior of individuals in another nation without engaging in a continuing contest of violence. Empirically-oriented researchers are well aware that viewing simple bivariate relationships can sometimes lead to erroneous conclusions, as seemingly important relationships can appear that are in fact spurious, or alternatively, that significant relationships can be hidden (i.e., Lewis-Beck 1980). However, the old maxim that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has a certain appeal, and our experience has taught us that sometimes simple visual analyses can lead to a greater understanding of patterns in the data than would be possible from the inspection of multivariate analyses
alone.
By examining figures that show trends in countries’ levels of democracy, and respect for human rights, we can gain an idea of the likelihood that hypotheses 1 and 2 are supported by data. In Figure 8.1 we depict the average Polity III democracy scores (a scale ranging from 0–10) during the time period under study, in years prior to US uses of force, at time t.
Figure 8.1 paints an interesting picture of the relationship between democracy and US military actions. The mean democracy scores in cases where US actions were to later occur are much lower than those to be found in countries where no such use of force would happen. Six years prior to an impending US military action, the average democracy score was just under 0.4, very near the bottom of the democracy scale. Democracy scores in other countries at that time, and across the period were by no means stellar, with means of around 3.5 to 4, on the bottom half of the scale, but they were substantially greater than in the countries where the USA was to later intervene, and statistically significantly (p<0.001).
Also interesting are the trends in both series across time. One sees an

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upward trend in democracy in both series, indicative of a global trend toward democratization during this period of time. The upward trend in democracy is somewhat greater among nations that would later experience a US use of force, perhaps because countries on the “0” end of the Polity Democracy spectrum cannot possibly see decreases in their democracy scores, whereas a certain percentage of cases achieving higher scores are apt to do so. The mean democracy score at the time of the use of force is 1.26, as compared to 3.89 in cases where the USA does not use force, a difference which is still highly significant (p<0.001). We can conclude from
this analysis, then, that the US tends to use force in a subset of cases that are very low in democracy, a finding consistent with Hypothesis 1. Further, when one examines the overall trend toward democracy one may also notice that the progress tends to halt one year prior to US military actions, as the democracy scores actually decrease from 1.08 to 1.05 from t_2 to t_1. Admittedly this decrease is very small, but it is suggestive that perhaps in some instances US uses of force could result from downturns in democracy, in addition to levels in that variable at a particular point in time. In Figure 8.2 we present trends in human rights scores, as measured by the Amnesty International Political Terror Scale, which ranges from 1 to 5 (where “1” is best for human rights practices and “5” is “worst”), and deals primarily with “personal integrity rights,” the right not to be imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, executed, or murdered, either arbitrarily or for one’s views. Here we see that countries that would experience US military actions are indeed substantially more repressive than others in the period leading up to that event