Human rights institutionalization and US humanitarian military intervention

Abstract

Are human rights a core value of US foreign policy? If so, how does the United States enforce human rights standards? Extant studies maintain that mass media, public opinion, and/or political concerns drive US decisions to engage in humanitarian military interventions. In this study, we explore the extent to which “human rights institutionalization” through the State Department’s human rights reporting affects the likelihood of US humanitarian interventions. We find that human rights institutionalization is a viable, and perhaps even the best, explanation for the robust connection between human rights violations and deployment of the US military. These findings suggest that the United States is willing to undertake costly action to enforce international standards of human rights, but with some important caveats. Overall, we provide large-N, quantitative support for the broader shifts in US humanitarian intervention described by qualitative scholars and experts in US strategy and security policy.