Why do some local religious organizations, particularly Christian foreign mission groups, send missionaries to culturally and politically risky states where they face personal high risks and political entanglements? I argue that local religious groups’ goals and motivations are driven by their involvement in international religious networks, which is a key factor in dispatching missionaries to high-risk countries. These religious activities are driven by constituted identities and expected behaviors from the international networks. I utilized a qualitative analysis of documented sources from domestic and international religious networks and 37 semistructured interview records with South Korean Protestant missionaries and church leaders to probe international influence on local actors’ motivations of religious activities. I also used quantitative data of the number of Korean missionaries collected from the Korea World Missions Association and the Korea Research Institute for Mission to assess several hypotheses describing the influence of global religious discourse on local actors’ motivations and practices. I built a framework of an interaction pattern of local actors and international religious networks and depicted how the shared idea of reaching high-risk countries among global religious actors influenced national actors. The study findings indicate that motivations of religious actors risking their lives in high-risk countries are connected to the power of discourse of “unreached people groups” shaped among global actors, and such discourse is actively constructed by global, national, and local actors.

This dissertation grapples with the dynamics of intractable conflicts, especially those fought on religious grounds. Intractable conflicts are conceptualized as those which are particularly resistant to resolution. They tend to widen in scope, grow in destructive intensity, and even lengthen in duration. Traditional conflict resolution techniques such as negotiation and mediation fail to manage or resolve such conflicts. Tangible issues with intangible salience are difficult to be resolved peacefully. Disagreements over religion have intangible significance, meaning they are difficult or impossible to define, understand and divide. They result in indivisible bargains, which subsequently lead to intense, persistent and hence, intractable conflicts. Existing literature mostly compares religious and non-religious conflicts and overlook the variations within religious conflicts, especially among different religious causes and their effects on conflict intractability. Operationalizing intractable conflicts in terms of their intensity and duration, I concentrate on conflicts between two world religions – Hinduism and Islam in India. Using the Varshney-Wilkinson Dataset on Hindu-Muslim Violence in India (1950-1995) and Mitra and Ray’s (2014) extension of the same dataset (1996-2000), I classify religious conflicts into four types – (1) Conflicts over Sacred Sites, (2) Animal Slaughter, (3) Religious Festivities and (4) Mixed. I hypothesize that compared to the latter three conflicts, any conflict that involves Sacred Sites results in greater intensity and duration and hence, will be the most intractable. Moreover, in comparison to non-religious conflicts, the same holds true. My findings confirm these hypotheses and additionally demonstrate the varied effects that each of these types have on conflict intensity and duration.

In this dissertation i argue that the internet has a positive impact on the likelihood of ethnic riots. To make this argument I put forward three major claims. First, ethnic riots are best understood as performances that aim to clarify ambiguities in the social order. Second, communication technologies structurally constrain the flow of information passing through them. Third, the internet is unique among modern Information Communication Technologies in its capacity for inducing ethnic riots. I provide two types of empirical evidence to support these claims: a cross-national analysis of internet penetration and a case study of India. The former provides evidence for the central claim, finding that the internet has a positive effect on the likelihood of ethnic conflict after a threshold of internet penetration is met. The latter sketches the limits of the proposed theory, finding that internet penetration decreased the likelihood of ethnic riots in India. I argue this is a result of welfare contextualization of the internet.

This thesis examines the current state of intervention in developing countries that are suffering from human rights abuses, mass killings, and/or politicide. The first part of this thesis will be a brief examination of present-day United States intervention efforts in order to understand the decision making and reconstruction process within the status quo. This will also be done by looking at the global community´s preferred form of intervention and how the United States aligns with these standards such as those represented in the Responsibility to Protect. Secondly, this thesis aims to remodel the reconstruction process in order to conceptualize the addition of mental health first aid. This will be presented by first analyzing the importance of mental health aid and then looking at the specific diagnoses that concatenate with trauma. This thesis argues that current reconstruction efforts are insufficient without the implementation of psychological aid. Without adding psychological aid, countries are more likely to return to cycles of violence that were present pre-intervention. Public policy should change to include aiding civilians, not only physically, economically, or militarily, but also by including psychological aid. Implementing behavior health specific aid in developing countries may potentially be the missing component to lasting change that countries need in order to sustain political sovereignty and support community efforts to rebuild. This research, therefore, aims to bridge important gaps between United States intervention efforts, public policy and mental health.

The creation of a wide array of international institutions has resulted in a diverse set of theories dedicated to explaining their development. Two theories in particular —neoliberal institutionalism and world culture theory — provide contrasting explanations for the emergence of these institutions. Neoliberal institutionalism is actor-centered, stressing the need for coordination and control to achieve a material interest-based social optimum. World culture theory takes into account a larger world culture that assigns agency to a wider variety of actors and a norm of institutional creation. This essay seeks to navigate the applicability of these two theories by examining the institutional category of international courts. The purpose of this essay is not to prove one theory’s applicability over the other, but rather to argue for the need for inclusion of a culture-centered approach in the analysis of newer and future international courts.

To illustrate this point, this essay identifies two distinct trends in the creation of international courts: trends in functionality and jurisdiction. The original function of courts has changed from strictly resolving disputes between states to include the enforcement of different types of international law. The jurisdiction of international courts has shifted in three areas: personal, subject matter, and membership jurisdiction. International courts now issue binding judgments that apply to actors other than states, interpret a more expansive selection of international law treaties and custom, and include more compulsory aspects for state membership in their founding documents. These trends are then used as a platform for application and analysis of both neoliberal institutionalism and world culture theory. The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 represents the latest forms of expanded functions and jurisdiction and is used as an in-depth case study. Specific aspects of the ICC’s negotiation process, such as the prominent use of moral discourse on the part of all actors and the significant and effective role played by non-state actors, holds unique implications for theoretical analysis. These two factors, in particular, illustrate a need to consider culture-based explanations for the ICC’s establishment in addition to traditional actor-centered theories.

International intellectual property law has become an important factor in international trade as the world economy has become increasing interconnected. The foundational international intellectual property agreement is the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement, negotiated in 1994 and required by the World Trade Organization of all its member states. The TRIPS regime establishes minimum standards of protection, but developed states, especially the United States, continually push other countries to enact more stringent laws. This paper explains the power dynamic underlying this international legal order, and furthermore answers how developing states respond. By drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory, Alisha Holland’s forbearance – the practice of states with the capacity to enforce laws choosing no to do so – and existing empirical studies of seven East and Southeast Asian states’ actions in the realm of intellectual property law in recent years, I argue that the intellectual property agreements under scrutiny are created and pushed by developed American and Western European states to serve their own economic interests. This is supported by a pattern of hegemonic meddling and threats, often by the United States, seeking to influence the domestic laws of developing states, and as a result prompts those states to pursue policies of deliberately partial enforcement – a prime example of forbearance – in an attempt to retain legal legitimacy under international agreements and drive their own economic development. This stands as a refutation of the naïve understanding that developed states have weak intellectual property protections due to apathy, ignorance, ineptitude, or other such moral failings (as developed states such as the United States have claimed). Instead, developing states are pursuing rational and deliberate legal strategies of partial enforcement.

Bioprospecting is the exploration of biodiversity in search of new resources with potential economic value. Since the colonial era, bioprospecting has led to the innovation of many valuable medical and commercial products. However, the extraction of these natural resources has historically been linked to the exploitation of indigenous populations, known as biopiracy. This review of the Maya ICBG Biopiracy Controversy provides an in-depth exploration into the delineation between bioprospecting and biopiracy to reveal that the unfounded claims of biopiracy halted a potentially successful bioprospecting project.

The difficulty of measuring complex goals within nongovernmental organizations is well detailed in nonprofit management literature. For many years, NGOs have faced obstacles ranging from the technical difficulties of measuring intangible missions to ambiguous or unreliable performance criteria to political issues in the design of measurement systems that cater to diverse stakeholders. But despite the challenges, many nongovernmental organizations and researchers are rising to the challenge to design and implement effective systems of measurement. This thesis outlines the lessons learned from a study of the history and development of performance measurement, existing measurement systems and their implementation, as well as various insights gained from interviews conducted in Spring 2013 with leaders of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that are facing or that have faced these and many more obstacles in performance management. With these goals, this paper will strive to answer two main questions. What are performance measures and how do they differ by sector? What are performance measurement systems and why are they important?

This thesis studies the world governing body of soccer, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), by investigating its recent controversial past as a world-leading international non-profit organization. Through examining the organization's beginnings as well as its growth into a nonprofit goliath, this thesis assesses FIFA's actions compared to both the relatively relaxed legal standards in its home country of Switzerland as well as an established set of moral guidelines to analyze the organization's validity in today's complicated global environment. Topics include concerns surrounding FIFA's vast financial reserves, the organization's development programs, its treatment of minorities, and its efforts to prevent organizational transparency that may lead to legitimacy questions in the near future. In the end, assessments of FIFA's validity conclude that the organization falls somewhere between being completely credible and definitively fraudulent, as its actions seemingly are satisfactory legally according to Swiss laws and regulations on paper but questionable morally.

In the United States, the past thirty years have brought with them a substantial rise in income and wealth inequality rates. Inequality in the U.S. has risen to levels not seen for nearly a century and shows no signs of decreasing in the near future. Conversely, Canada has experienced lower levels of inequality during this same period despite many similarities and ties to the U.S. Therefore, the purpose of this paper will be to examine the extent to which these two countries differ in this area and identify some of the more salient factors that have contributed to this divergence, including tax policies, unionization rates, and financial industry regulation, as well as the deeper, more fundamental elements of each nation's identity.