A New Rhetorical Legacy? Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and US Foreign Military Intervention (1980-2020)
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Previous academic literature indicates that the United States has used the rhetoric of democracy, international norms, and national security to justify its foreign military interventions from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Kerton-Johnson, 2011). However, scholars have failed to substantially investigate the American use of human rights rhetoric as a defense of military intervention. When the United States has intervened militarily in a foreign country, how has it used human rights rhetoric to justify its military action? Which human rights does the U.S. cite, and how do these statements match the reality of the human rights conditions on the ground for each case? To answer these questions, I conducted original textual analysis of 60 presidential speeches from the American Presidency Project and compared human rights justifications from these speeches to the actual human rights situations of each case. Through my research, I critically analyze the existence and political implications of the invocation of human rights rhetoric in the past, present, and future of American foreign policy. This thesis finds that American presidents historically have used human rights rhetoric to justify U.S. foreign military intervention, particularly during responses to humanitarian crises in the 1990s and more recently since the 2011 intervention in Libya. Further, within these justifications, presidents most often invoke the rhetoric of personal integrity rights, such as the human right to "life, liberty, and security." However, presidential uses of human rights rhetoric do not match human rights situations on the ground. American presidents frequently portray U.S. foreign policy as addressing human rights violations, yet there is no statistically significant relationship between presidential uses of human rights rhetoric and the actual human rights situations within countries of intervention. This thesis contributes new scholarship to the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and how it is argued to domestic and foreign publics. Through its multilevel investigation, this thesis raises critical implications of presidents’ potential to abuse the use of humanitarian and human rights rhetoric in justifications for U.S. military intervention.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | June 3, 2022; June 3, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Adams-Menendez, Natalie |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Tomz, Michael |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Program in International Relations |
Subjects
| Subject | Human rights |
|---|---|
| Subject | Intervention (International law) |
| Subject | Humanitarian intervention |
| Subject | Rhetoric > Political aspects |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Adams-Menendez, N. (2022). A New Rhetorical Legacy? Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and US Foreign Military Intervention (1980-2020). Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/nn086fr0158
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Stanford University, Program in International Relations, Honors Theses
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