Fellows 2019

Betcy Jose

Assosciate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Denver

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

January – April 2019

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Russia as a Norm Contester and Norm Entrepreneur«

Project outline:

A recent version of humanitarian intervention is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. It sanctions nonintervention norm violations if military force is a measure of last resort and the United Nations Security Council approves the intervention. However, with the 2014 Crimea episode, Russia seemingly not only challenged R2P but also offered an alternative framework to permissibly engage in a country’s domestic affairs. This project scrutinizes these endeavors in two ways. First, it will explore how the international community reacted to Russia’s justifications for its Crimean intervention, inquiring into who rejected them, who accepted them, and why. Second, it will theorize why Russia embarked on this effort to challenge this global norm. In doing so, the project will investigate the role of ideas and values in contributing to a country’s overall power status.
Through these endeavors, this project strives to advance our understanding of how global norms are created and modified. By investigating the impact of Russian humanitarian arguments on the international rules permitting violations of sovereignty norms, this project contributes to a wide array of literatures such as the literatures on the international dimension of authoritarian regimes, post-Soviet area studies, and global norms. It advances the debate about the various measures that powerful authoritarian regimes undertake to promote their foreign policy goals and what those goals may be. (Betcy Jose)

Research partner:

Betcy Jose follows the invitation of Nicole Deitelhoff (Professor of International Relations and Theories of Global Orders, Goethe University) and the Cluster of Excellence »The Formation of Normative Orders«.

Scholarly profile of Betcy Jose

Betcy Jose is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Colorado (Denver). In 2016 she was a Visiting Researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg and Berlin in the field of International Diffusion and Cooperation of Authoritarian Regimes network.

Website:
Please find more information about Betcy Jose here.

Main areas of research:

Armed conflict, global norms and international humanitarian law.

Selected publications:

(with Christoph H. Stefes) »Russian Norm Entrepreneurship in Crimea – Serious Contestation or Cheap Talk?«, in: GIGA Working Paper, No. 311 (2018).
»Not Completely the New Normal: How Human Rights Watch Tried to Suppress the Targeted Killing Norm«, in: Contemporary Security Policy, 2017 (Winner of the 2018 Bernard Brodie Prize).
»Bin Laden’s Targeted Killing and Emerging Norms«, in: Critical Studies on Terrorism, 10/1 (2017), p. 44-66.
(with Peace Medie) »Civilian Self-Protection and Civilian Targeting in Armed Conflicts: Who Protects Civilians?«, in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2016).

Betcy Jose

Scholarly profile of Betcy Jose

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