State of emergency and international alignment behaviors: Origins and implications

This dissertation investigates the relationship between state of emergency (SOE) and interstate alignment behaviors, particularly adherence to human rights norms, security alliance formation, and participation in international peacekeeping efforts. Therefore, the study aims to answer the following related questions: "Does international setting matter for emergency declarations?" and "How do emergency declarations structure the cooperative interstate interactions?" Based on the review of legal-political theoretical discussions and a Boolean concept logic, this research develops an SOE conceptualization that can serve as a springboard for comparative research on the links between emergency and world politics. An SOE is, then, one of the governance types when a leader portrays a situation/crisis as a threat to a state's survival and calls for extraordinary actions to address this situation/crisis. Unlike common conception, however, emergency declarations do not only reflect the political regimes' institutionalized ways of handling crises. First, SOEs and the resultant practices exhibit the extent of abidance by the international treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to draw the boundaries between derogable and non-derogable rights violations in times of crises. Second, SOEs reveal shifting power dynamics among the public, judiciary, legislative, armed forces, and the executive, who increasingly depend on external allies' resources to remain in power. Accordingly, this research tests its expectations in a theoretically informed and methodologically robust collection of an original cross-national time-series SOE dataset based on hand-coded newspaper articles covering 24 Latin American countries between 1975 and 2018. Two qualitative case studies from Bolivia and Peru further elaborate on the causal mechanisms. Overall, the first main result suggests the strength of liberal norm diffusion that political, social, economic, and diplomatic ties to the West (such as those with the United States and the European Union countries) are associated with a higher proclivity to declare SOEs. The second primary finding evinces the logic of political survival that the executive deploying the military during SOEs is subsequently more inclined to sign defense cooperation agreements to keep the military resourceful with ally sources. Furthermore, regardless of military mobilization during the SOEs, countries that declare emergencies tend to participate more in peacekeeping operations, possibly to receive funding from the international community in the post-SOE phase and to repair their reputation abroad.